Winter's Child
by J. Elisabeth
Summary: A girlhood among ghosts - living and dead - and the day everything changed. "Timeless" AU. Complete.
1. Landing

**Winter's Child**

**

* * *

**_Note: I don't usually write AU – I like to fit inside worlds that already exist. But "Timeless" is one of my exceptions. What would have happened if everyone hadn't died – and come on, what really happened after dinner in Janeway's quarters that night? Ostensibly J/C, implied P/T, but this is really a story about loneliness, guilt, and growing up in a world saturated by both. _

_Disclaimer: Paramount owns the original (and a lovely job they did with it too). Bea and Zayek, though, belong to me._

_Rating: K+ (an over-cautious PG). _

_

* * *

_It's hard for me to imagine anything less able to fly than _Voyager._ My imagination is perfectly healthy, fed on classic novels and Tom's stories of his wayward youth, but all the same: I don't really believe that this was a starship. It has a bridge, and whatever's left of a warp core, and we throw around words like ready room and sickbay and console and ops. I learned to walk at conn, and I've spent most of my life in the Jefferies tubes. But those are just words, bits and pieces of a whole, and no matter how I try and I can't put them together to build anything more than the frozen shelter that traps and protects us.

The intrepid _Voyager._ It's the basis of our story, but I can't help it: I don't quite believe it. Every night of my life, it seems, I've sat up and listened to the stories. I know everything about the people who lie frozen along the intact lower decks, laid out starkly and respectfully. I know their favorite bad jokes, what stations they worked, and where they were from. I know that at some point during the journey, each and every one of them did something extraordinary, and I know what it was, and when. My mother explained to me once, her voice low and hoarse with grief, that it's the way we pay our respects and keep ourselves from feeling too lonely. We recite their lives, and keep them alive just a little bit.

Tom told me that remembering is also the way we stay alive, because we have nothing but the warmth of the past. Though I heard him say, too, when he thought I wasn't around, that it's the way my mother keeps the guilt sharp, which he supposed was better than being numb. But that he wished she didn't live every day in such pain.

I don't know what choice she has, though. I try to imagine, sometimes, what it must be like to be my mother. That's the hardest of all, harder than imagining this ship among the stars. She doesn't like to talk about herself too much, and I know that Tom is at least partly right, because she lives with grief and guilt as surely as she lives with the cold. What I know about her, I've learned from others, and I don't press too hard. I don't want to remind her of what she was. I know she thinks about it all the time anyway, but all the same, I let her just be my mother. Every one else tries to do the same, but they can't help but call her "Captain," or defer to her authority.

To them, to herself, she is still Captain Kathryn Janeway, of the Federation Starship _Voyager._ She's a small woman, and seems smaller under layers of fabric that bundle her in the cold; her hair is long now, an auburn tinged with grey, and always braided and hidden under a scarf. Her eyes are piercing, pure blue, and her skin fair. Looking at her, I wonder how I can possibly be related to her, because where she is pale, I am dark: my hair is a rich brown, with only a hint of her Irish red, my eyes brown, and my skin, though not brown, is definitely more gold than pink. She's tiny, but I'm much more solidly built, hips broader, already taller at fourteen. She marvels at the differences between us, and one of my earliest memories is her whispering, "Will you be entirely your father, child? Or am I in there somewhere?" into my sleeping ear. That was the only time she ever spoke of him in my presence; I suspect that it's simply the only time she's spoken of him, at all, since the crash.

My earliest memory, of course, is the cold. It pervades every story I have, every day I can remember, every night spent exhausted and shivering. After the crash, almost every system was damaged, and the rest were quickly shut down by the survivors to conserve energy. Environmental controls were mangled beyond repair, and heating devices quickly rigged to replace them. Life support is only maintained on deck one, and even then at partial power, and so cold thin air is the only kind I've ever known.

* * *

As much as they like telling stories, no one likes to talk about the crash. But it's where my story begins, and with careful observation and well-timed pleading, I've learned a few things.

_Voyager_ crashed on this L-class planet 15 years ago.

An L-class planet is one with an oxygen atmosphere that's the wrong distance from its star to readily sustain human life. Or, as Tom calls it, and L-class planet is a block of ice, or a desert, or awful impenetrable jungle, but it's always a nightmare.

They were trying to get home. Always, they were trying to get home, but this time had built something extraordinary. They modified the warp core to travel through subspace, but it wasn't a perfect channel, and they were thrown out, desperate and damaged.

They landed. There wasn't enough power to keep the ship from being torn apart in space, so they set down for the last time, only they didn't realize it was the last time until the snow settled again and the few who survived came to and looked around. The lower decks had been compacted, and the nacelles were crushed. It took only a few months for the creeping ice to cover the ship, but even untrapped, _Voyager_ could never fly again.

Most of the crew died. Anyone in the labs, the corridors, or crew quarters died on impact; there were seven survivors on the bridge, nine in engineering, and six in the mess hall. Of those, only eleven were still alive after a week: Kathryn Janeway, Tom Paris, Tuvok, Greg Ayala, B'Elanna Torres, Joe Carey, Eddie Matteo, Madelein Swinn, Beth Foster, Juliet Jarot, and Naomi Wildman. The rest – Vorik, John Culhane, Sandra Sena, Neelix, Samantha Wildman, Zaineb Trumari, Jenny Delaney, Renlay Sharr, T'Rel, and Jor Ayo – joined their crewmates below decks one by one.

There were two more crew members, who had been in a shuttlecraft ahead of the ship, guiding them home: Harry Kim and Chakotay. No one knew if they had survived.

* * *

In the stories we tell, everything is divided into just after, months after, and years after the crash.

Just after, the healthiest of the survivors fought to keep themselves and the injured alive. Everyone was hurt, and Naomi was the only one without broken bones. Without the EMH and without power, bruises and burns went all but untreated, and resources went toward repairing concussions and fractures. Even so, so many people died that everyone despaired: how could they survive with nineteen? Sixteen? Twelve?

At the end of that week, the eleven that were left were numbed to grief. Days of moving the frozen bodies of friends, cataloguing the dead and the living, breaking into quarters to take blankets and spare clothing and anything with an independent power source, had sharpened their sensitivity to their own survival. They established a home base on deck one, because it was easier to isolate than anywhere else on the ship and had more independent backup systems. They shut down everything else, rebuilt the oxygen production systems, built a heater out of bulkheads and phaser fire in the conference room. Those first weeks, they all slept there together, abandoning privacy for warmth.

Early on, they brought plants from aeroponics, and set up a garden in the corridors behind the bridge. Several of the species that Kes and Neelix had collected at the beginning of the journey were cold-hardy and much less fragile than Terran species, and the lighting on that deck was modified to produce the necessary full visible spectrum. It was a drain on power, but one that couldn't be avoided, and the engineers soon designed a generator that could efficiently convert mechanical to electrical energy. Everyone had to spend time each day winding the device, but boring physical labor was a small price to pay for food.

The bridge was cleared, but it was too big to heat efficiently. In fact, everywhere was: with the lights eating up power, there was no way to heat any room to a reasonable temperature. It didn't take long before someone thought of the Jefferies tubes, which could much more easily be insulated and warmed, and would also afford privacy. Over the next few weeks, the survivors worked to create small shelters in the tubes, rerouting wiring in some places and removing it in others, diligently preserving necessary systems and cannibalizing the rest. At first, only six shelters were built, and the bedding taken from crew quarters was distributed. Tom still tells stories about how he and Joe Carey decided to bring mattresses up, and spent three long days levering them through Jefferies tubes.

These nests were, and still are, mostly a place to sleep. The crew turned their first communal bedroom into a mess hall and work space, where they ate their meals and discussed the next project. The lower deck of the bridge was where serious construction projects happened, and was usually filled with rubble and disassembled bulkheads. The ready-room, now looking out on twisting ice crystals, became a schoolroom, a library, and a museum. It was where they kept things that they couldn't or wouldn't cannibalize, pictures and artifacts from their past life.

A starship's heart is its bridge; _Voyager's_ heart was still beating, but the rest of it was paralyzed and abandoned. But they survived, and after a fashion, flourished: the garden grew and produced enough vegetables and grain to feed everyone, and B'Elanna Torres and Eddie Matteo, who had been trained in exogenetics, modified the gel packs to photosynthesize and produce heat, so that a gel pack left in the garden all day would heat a shelter at night. Tom and Joe managed to bring up some twenty mattresses in a burst of enthusiasm, and the crew spent days arguing about what to do with them. Naomi Wildman found the storage locker with the emergency medical supplies, and step by step they inched away from death.

And, of course, I was born.


	2. Enter Bea

**Winter's Child, continued.

* * *

**

I was born eight months and six days after the crash. By that time, they had found the EMH, and when my mother went into labor activated the program; the emitter's power source was too precious to waste with prenatal care. He said I was early and scrawny, but a healthy, ordinary human girl, and that my mother should be very pleased. If he was shocked to be brought back to life to attend to a very pregnant captain on a frozen ship, I've never heard about it.

In fact, there is a surprising lack of shock surrounding my birth – at least as it has been presented to me. In my hearing, it has never been said that any of the crew was startled when seven weeks after the crash, their captain pulled Tom aside and demanded a physical, which was not something she had ever asked for before. His announcement that she was seven weeks pregnant was apparently taken in stride, and no one has ever let slip that there was confusion and gossip and utter bewilderment.

All the same, though, I have my own theories. My mother was not exactly promiscuous, in the eyes of her crew; Greg Ayala once said that whatever captains like Kirk had done, my mother was cut of a different cloth, and since in all the stories she seemed welded to a phaser rifle I had to assume he meant other qualities. On the ship, it was commonly held that she hadn't given her heart or her body to anyone in the last five years. She was not married, not dating, and not involved. I cannot believe that everyone reacted as calmly to my intrusion as they would like me to think. I don't doubt, though, that out of love and respect for her their curiosity was quickly and ruthlessly stifled, to be discussed in whispers while lugging mattresses up four decks of ladders.

For my part, though, I didn't wonder. I had no model for what family life was supposed to be like, and save for that one whisper no one ever mentioned that I was missing a father, so I never thought to miss him. My bedtime stories were gently edited, and it wasn't until I was two and Zayek was born that anything contradicted those stories. Still, it wasn't immediately clear to me that Tuvok was an important part of the equation, because Zayek was, after all, Madelein Swinn's baby. That Tuvok took care of the child, and consequently cared for Maddie, seemed only natural; hadn't I been looked after by everyone my whole life? Of course, no one explains pon farr to a toddler, and Tuvok's betrayal of his wife in order to survive and his complex relationship with a woman who had until then always been Ensign Swinn were beyond me.

No, it wasn't until I was seven and the third child among us was born that I began to wonder. Tom and B'Elanna had been lovers my whole life; I was three when they asked my mother to make it official, and shivered through the ceremony in the ready room. And when B'Elanna began to grow and grumble a few years later, muttering insincerely about the efficacy of frozen contraceptives, it was explained that she and Tom were going to have a baby. When little Harry was born, my mother gripped my hand very tightly as she ushered me into the tube junction with everyone else to meet the baby. The Doctor wrapped the baby and presented him to his father first, a tiny wailing bundle.

"Your son, Tom," he said affectionately. The Doctor, who had been activated only a handful of times since my birth, looked around the impromptu birthing chamber and said softly, "I wish there were a way that I could be here to help you." Since the energy to activate his program was considerable, he performed quick physicals on everyone before he was switched off again. The adults were tired and cold but for the most part healthy, though he lingered with particular concern over my mother. Unable to put his worries into words, he turned his holographic tricorder to me.

"You've certainly grown, Bea," he said cheerfully. Since I'd been four when he'd been turned on last, when Beth Foster's paralysis had begun to affect her metabolism, this wasn't surprising. "And you're the healthiest of the lot. Your blood-oxygen efficiency trumps the rest, and you're very well adapted to the cold for a human." He scanned a moment longer, and pressed a few buttons on the tricorder. "Hmmm."

"Doctor?" My mother's best captain's voice cut across his musings. There was a sudden tension in the small room, and the EMH hurriedly moved on to Zayek. When he returned to little Harry, I was peering with fascination at the baby and so heard what my mother did not.

"No dice, Tom," the doctor murmured, and then, with an enormous smile, asked to hold the baby in much more audible tones.

At seven, my education hadn't yet gotten around to mammalian genetics, so I didn't guess what the Doctor was after. I was more worried about Tom's sudden fatherhood. Everyone exclaimed over Harry's tiny little cranial ridges and his brown eyes, saying how much he looked like his mother, but Eddie swore that his hair was that shade of coppery blond and Maddie said his cheekbones mirrored Tom's exactly. No one had ever said that I looked like anything but my mother, and they rarely said that, but I knew that Zayek had Tuvok's sharp ears and calm gaze, even at five, and now Harry had his father's bones.

Whose bones did I have? Whose ears? Waiting for my mother in the nest we shared, I undid my braids and worried at my tangled dark hair. Was I supposed to have a father, who held me when I was born and counted my toes and watched me while I slept, as Tom did?

* * *

It was Zayek who went looking for me a few days later, the only one who noticed my deeper silence and, I'm sure, my judicious observation of the new baby with his father. He was a very real friend, a serious boy who I could still get to laugh when Tuvok wasn't around, and we'd always gotten along. He found me behind the ops station, watching my breath evaporate, and sat beside me for a few minutes before saying anything. One of my favorite things about him was that he never wasted time with pleasantries, but that time I found it profoundly irritating.

"Are you angry, that Tom cannot spend time with us as before?"

"No."

He considered, then offered, "Frustrated, then, that our lessons will be rescheduled until B'Elanna is back on her feet?"

"I don't care about engineering class."

He raised an eyebrow. I knew he practiced this, and usually I teased him mercilessly for it, but that day I wasn't in the mood. "Then, if you are not irritated by our change in status, what it is?"

"Don't be so Vulcan, Zayek. 'Change in status.' There's a baby, of course they don't have any time for us." He waited, very still beside me, and I finally turned to him. "You wouldn't understand. You have a father."

That broke his calm somewhat; he wasn't as good at being Vulcan when he was confused, and he wrinkled his nose at me. "You're mad because I have a father." I rolled my eyes, knowing as I did how childish it sounded, but didn't say anything. "Because Harry has a father?" he said. "Well. You could talk to Naomi. She was raised on _Voyager_ by her mother, was she not?" Grateful that he didn't take it personally that he wasn't the person I needed just then, I hugged him, if only to make him wrinkle his nose again.

Naomi was almost always in the garden; she said that it reminded her of before, when the ship was brighter and she used to work in aeroponics with Neelix. While we pruned and tied up plants, she would tell me stories about him and Kes, who had cared for her often, and I liked hearing about something other than hostile aliens and derring-do. It made _Voyager_ sound like a warm, exciting place to be a child, full of kind and welcoming people. In the well-lit, plant-filled corridors, I could almost believe it.

I went that day and helped her to harvest the khari wheat, stripping the grain with chapped fingers from the purplish stalks. It took me nearly a half hour to start talking, but when I finally voiced my question, rushing through it my embarrassment and confusion, she stayed quiet until I had finished. "… and Zayek thought that maybe, since you had only a mom too, that – that – "

"That I could explain?" She smiled, but kept her eyes on her work. "I know what it feels like, Bea, to wonder about your dad, but it's not that I don't have one. See, I was – I started growing inside my mother before _Voyager_ got thrown across the galaxy. My father wasn't on the ship, so I never knew him." Her nimble fingers skimmed over the plant, and her face was serene, but my hands shook as I tied up a full bundle of grain to be threshed. "All I ever had was stories, and of course," she took the bundle from me, squeezed my hand surreptitiously, "my spikes."

"But I don't think I have a father," I said, tugging my hand back and fumbling over fresh stalks. "I know I don't have one _here_, I get that, but I don't think I have one at all." Naomi turned to me with amused eyes. I hated that, so I hurried to explained, "My mother never even told me stories. Maybe there aren't any."

"The captain – she's very private, Bea. She must miss your father very much, and if he's not here, he's almost certainly dead. If I were her, I wouldn't want to think about that. It's very hard, to be alone." She sighed, and fixed her hazel eyes on mine. "The thing is, though, that you're human, and humans can't just reproduce without – with only a mother. It doesn't work like that Bea." She squeezed my hand. "No, you're a combination of both your parents, even if you only know one of them."

"But – "

"Do you look just like your mother?" She tucked a strand of dark hair behind my ear, and rested her hand on my shoulder. "Those differences came from somewhere, didn't they?" I said nothing, but I nodded: she had confirmed exactly what I had been thinking. "I know it's hard. But the thing is, your mother loves you so much. She loves you double, Bea, and all of us do too."

They were comforting words, but hardly answered my question. It had never occurred to me that I wouldn't be loved – I just wanted to know where my ears came from. I knew that I couldn't ask my mother, because if she hadn't told me yet she didn't want to, and the sorrow that surrounded her was too profound to deepen it with childish questions.

I resigned myself to not knowing, and life beneath the ice went on.

* * *

The cast of characters of my story – the living, breathing ones that I saw every day – was limited, and the worlds beyond the glacier never intruded.

Tuvok was a silent force behind our survival, working tirelessly to improve our lives, but spending little time in common space. He said the extreme cold weakened his control, and he kept away to respect our privacy and protect his own. Still, he taught the children mathematics and theoretical science; we endured classes in Starfleet protocol for the promise of self-defense lessons, which were exciting, no matter how serious Tuvok tried to make them. He taught us calm our minds, to fool ourselves into feeling warmth when we were so cold we thought we'd die, and to be patient. I was a little afraid of him, but grateful all the same: he was the only one who could confront my mother when her guilt overwhelmed her.

Madelein Swinn was a generous, intelligent woman, an engineer who liked working with her hands. If the cold bothered her, she never let us know, and she was always busy. When we were particularly rowdy would bundle us up and take us below decks, organizing games and races in the corridors. The first time Tuvok underwent the pon farr, isolating himself to protect the crew and completely prepared to die, she alone figured it out and confronted him, overcoming his logic with her own.

Juliet Jarot was a young woman, aged by the cold and fear we lived with. She was a Betazoid, and, like Tuvok, kept her distance. Raised on Earth and used to humans, she still found it wearing to constantly shield herself. She worked in the gardens fourteen hours a day, devoted to the plants that maintained our feeble grip on survival, and it was botany, zoology, and genetics that she taught. Naomi spent most of her time there, too, and learned compassion and patience. I didn't know Juliet well, but I would have trusted her with my fears and secrets, as I trusted Naomi.

I can't think of Greg Ayala and Eddie Matteo separately, although I know that they were very different men before the crash; Greg joked that after three years cuddling with a stranger for warmth, you start cuddling for other reasons. They were an excellent team. Eddie was a creative engineer, always tinkering, and he and Greg were always building some new material or machine to make our lives a little easier. Still, they weren't above grinding flour and running the dynamo, and I caught them more than once, hand in hand, wandering the halls and imagining their life above the ice. Greg taught us history, Eddie physical science, but together they taught us hope, firm in their beliefs that we would be rescued, or that Harry and Chakotay were alive.

Tom Paris taught a different kind of hope. He was my favorite babysitter, and I spent a lot of time with him when I was young; he would wrap Zayek and I up in blankets and teach us old Earth card games while everyone else salvaged below. He told the best stories, played the best games, and always answered questions with the truth. He cared for our injuries and illnesses, but for our souls, too; it was he who managed to replicate my mother a single cup of coffee for her birthday by spending nearly six days running the dynamo while she slept, or surprised Naomi with a photo album that he'd found in the wreckage of her old quarters.

B'Elanna Torres I trusted too; she didn't lie, and she didn't mince words. Terrifying but reassuring all the same, she never hesitated to give me something to do when she caught me hanging around. She taught us practical engineering, and tried to explain how a starship should work. In retrospect, I think that her patience for me had a lot to do with my fatherlessness, but I appreciated it regardless. She scared Zayek silly.

Beth Foster was the one who taught me faith. Her spine had been broken in the crash, far beyond the Doctor's ability to repair without a surgical team or a power grid, and she was paralyzed from the waist down. She worked constantly, trying to build a transceiver or work out the ship's position from the last data recorded before the crash. She wasn't that interested in spending time on anything but her work, but the crew understood, and gave her the space to believe that she could get back to Federation space and medical science.

Joe Carey, noticing just how many skilled engineers had survived, decided to focus instead on food production. He let Juliet work in the gardens, but he built a mill to grind flour and tried his hardest to create palatable meals. He kept the conference room alive and almost warm with his presence, chased Zayek and I good-naturedly away from bubbling pots more than once, and always tried to remember birthdays. We were always hungry, but Joe taught me from an early age what it was to work very hard so that your friends could survive.

The rest of us – Naomi, Zayek, Harry, Ada, me, and little Miral – are a work in progress.

* * *

If I were to ask my mother to describe the routine of a single day aboard a living ship, she would be able to do it without hesitation. There were schedules and protocols and rules, duty rosters and shift changes. Everyone and everything had a time and a place, and their orderly, Starfleet days passed in an orderly, Starfleet way.

If I tried to do the same, I'd be doomed to failure. There were no schedules on the _Voyager_ I grew up on; there was one reliable chronometer on board, and the time it showed bore no relation to the dim light that filtered through the layers of ice overhead. There was always work to do, and it wasn't dictated by protocol so much as necessity, because if the oxygen production system failed, it didn't matter whether we pruned the garden or not. There was no really sensible division of labor, and the routine that we settled into for a few weeks would be upset by the next crisis and entirely replaced afterward.

Moreover, a given day on a frozen ship is simply not very memorable. It was always dimly lit, and always cold, and the creeping frost made everything seem fuzzy around the edges. I woke each morning not because any kind of alarm went off but because the gel pack nestled in my blankets had gone cold. If my mother had slipped a new one into the nest before she left, I would still have been woken by the knawing in my belly. We ate breakfast, hard bread or pale wheat mush of which we never quite got enough, and then Zayek and I would be tutored by whoever happened to be free. It made for a haphazard education, made more so by the fact that we had few functional PADDS and no access to the computer core. We studied everyone's pet subject and skipped over what no one could remember, meaning that we knew a great deal about 20th century history but avoided basic biology in favor of complex genetics. We were probably the only Federation children under ten who could have analyzed Borg technology but didn't know a thing about the water cycle.

After lessons, which went on for as long as our instructor felt like talking, we would help with "chores," and each day would fade into the next. Hours spent in the garden, or helping B'Elanna harvest kilometers of wiring, or pounding flour with Joe, all run together now. I remember the birth of every child and every celebration we had only because there were so few, and they stood in such sharp contrast to the grey monotony of every other day.

But those gatherings, in my memory, are bright. I know that they took place in rooms as dark and icy as everything else, but I remember how happy everyone looked at our annual everyone's-birthday party, or Eddie and Greg's wedding, or Ada's birth. It was like a glimpse into the past; my mother would usually be called upon to officiate or make a speech, and her grief would lift, to be replaced by a heartbreaking pride in her ship and her crew. Tom's eyes would sparkle and his jokes would get worse, and B'Elanna would stop being the grim engineer and be for a moment his partner in crime. There, I saw Tuvok's wry humor and heard silent Beth sing, watched Maddie draw Greg into a polka to Juliet and Eddie's uproarious laughter. They were my family, the men and women who had raised me, but in those moments it was as thought I had never met them before, and it was then that I understood how much had been lost in the crash.

Even in the midst of celebration, though, my mother never let go of her guilt for long. I would see the flicker of pain in her eyes as she watched her little band, acutely aware of how many of her charges weren't there, of how many bodies lined the corridors below. Sometimes I would catch her glancing at me, and it seemed I could see right through her smile to the sorrow below.

That second wedding took place only a few weeks after little Harry's arrival, and I sat back and watched, still preoccupied with fatherhood. Tom had the baby wrapped against his skin for warmth, and as he sat joking about the other Harry's crush on Greg, the wrong twin, and the resident ex-Borg, he kept a gentle hand cradling his son's head. Even my mother laughed at the story, and I again caught a glimpse of the captain that she had once been. She was, for an instant, transformed by joy, and I thought again of what Naomi had said about my father, and how hard it was to be alone.

Later, as she brushed and braided my dark hair, I asked her, "Are you happy, mama?"

She didn't answer, but she paused a moment, her hand working through my snarled hair. "Why do you ask, Beatrice?"

I couldn't answer that without asking the question that I'd promised myself not to, so I simply said, "You look sad, sometimes."

Softly, she said, "Are you happy?"

It was too complex a question for a seven year old, but I considered it, only too aware that she had neatly sidestepped my own. What was happiness, anyway? "I like being alive. So, I suppose, yes."

"Are you lonely here?" I couldn't see her face, and she seemed weary, worried, as she had always been, ever since her ship had come to ground for the last time.

And, of course, I was lonely. It was lonesome, to live trapped here, but knowing that there were worlds and people and adventures on the other side of the glacier. But I didn't want to say that: the ice and the isolation weren't her fault, and were nothing she could fix. "I have you, and Tom, and Maddie and Joe and everyone. I have Zayek. I have classes and jobs to do. There isn't much time to be lonely." I turned around in her lap. "Are you?"

"Oh, no." Her response was instant. She searched my eyes, the lines of my face, then kissed me on the forehead. "Beatrice Teya Janeway. How could I ever be lonely, when I have you?"

I knew it was a lie, but it was one she needed to tell, and one she needed me to believe.


	3. History

**Winter's Child, continued.

* * *

**

I didn't lie to my mother: I wasn't unhappy. Growing up on _Voyager_ wasn't easy, and we shivered through our days and nights. It was a life of hard work, and we fought a never-ending battle against the crushing glacier and the endless cold. The adults I knew were shadows of their former selves, tired, worried, angry, and sad, but they taught and loved us all the more fiercely for it.

And what did I know about happiness? No matter how much they tried to teach us about life beyond the ship, stars remained purely theoretical, sunshine a dim flicker at planetary noon. We knew it was cold, but we'd never known a place where the air was as warm as our bodies and never climbed into bed at night without checking for frostbite first. The convenience of a food replicator, an escape to a holodeck, even the simple relief of a hypospray were beyond our understanding. So maybe my mother's happiness was harder to buy than mine.

It was enough, for me, that Zayek and I could explore the abandoned crew quarters and fight off imaginary aliens; it was enough that we sat for hours together behind the ops console, building cities from scraps and wires. When we gathered together to eat and Joe surprised us with something spicy or sweet, it didn't matter that most of the time we ate food more or less unflavored. I liked to solve the math problems everyone else gave up on, carving the equations into the frost on the walls until the solution came clear, and there was nothing so satisfying as patching the oxygen delivery wires, half buried inside the bulkhead, with B'Elanna whispering encouragement behind me.

I remember curling up behind Joe's oven, taking advantage of the rare warmth, devouring books I'd discovered below decks, and then arguing with Zayek about whether he should expect Jane Eyre to behave logically or not. Sometimes I would slip away from the adults and climb down to my mother's old quarters, to sift through what she couldn't bring with her through the crash. There was the time that Zayek tried to initiate a mind meld, and it worked, to our very real surprise; we yelled and broke the link, but dreamed each other's dreams for weeks afterward. One year Tom built a ramp of snow in the corridors on deck two, and we skidded and sled on old bulkhead casings until Tuvok insisted we get back to work.

That, I think, was happiness. However grim our circumstances, it seemed to me that I was still pretty lucky. The crew was dedicated and determined that their children never miss what they couldn't have, and between them they answered almost any question we could think to ask.

The few they couldn't answer, we took to be universal unknowns: if we would ever escape, the identity of the world we had crashed on, and if the Federation even knew to look for us.

* * *

Ada was born two years after the second marriage, and she seemed to me unreasonably lucky from the very beginning: she had three fathers, while I had none.

The second time that Tuvok underwent the pon farr, Maddie again volunteered. She must have been counting the days, because none of us noticed his increasing agitation before she sought him out. Despite his embarrassment, he assented, and the rest of the crew gave him space to struggle with this second transgression of his vows.

At that point, I was eight, and much more aware of the adult whispers around me. It was Joe who explained that Tuvok had another family, far away, and that he had never planned to start a second one; though he surely loved Zayek, it was hard to change your plans that way. That I understood, since we lived in the middle of a broken plan, but it was still hard to know what to say to Zayek about his parents. I remember my mother thanking Maddie for her willingness to help Tuvok, and Madelein saying that they all needed him and that sex was certainly the least she could do. Of all the questions I didn't know how to ask, this seemed a good place to start, and I soon learned much more about reproduction than I ever wanted to know; my mother, despite her urge to privacy, believes in being thorough.

No one missed the longing in Eddie's eyes as Maddie's belly swelled again, not even me. Tucked behind ops, I overheard her and Tuvok discussing the child, and her tentative suggestion that they let Greg and Eddie raise it. "We would be a part of the child's life, of course, but trapped down here… well, it may be their only chance to start a family. And we're hardly a loving couple, much as I respect you." Tuvok was unswayed by her sentimentality, but agreed that it would be a better allocation of resources, as long as the would-be parents understood the needs of a half-Vulcan child.

They did, and were excited by the challenge. In the months before the birth, they spent a great deal of time with Zayek and pumped Tom, my mother, and Maddie for information on caring for an infant below zero degrees centigrade. When the baby arrived, Madelein insisted that the Doctor give her right to Eddie, and as soon as she slid up against his bare chest, skin to skin for warmth, she stopped wailing. Joe and Naomi laughed and began to applaud, and Maddie hugged Zayek against her, watching the little family that she'd just helped to create.

Ada was a serious baby; I suspected early on that she was a little more Vulcan than Zayek, for all his eyebrow raising. Eddie and Greg's excitement over her every squint and squirm was infectious, but I still felt irrationally angry about the whole thing. Sitting on Tom's lap at conn, having an imaginary piloting lesson, I let this resentment slip while carefully increasing thruster strength by tapping my fingers on the dead console. I couldn't see his face, but I heard his sharp inhalation and felt the sudden stillness of his body. When he spoke, his voice was soft.

"Bea, you have just as many fathers as Ada does."

"Well, obviously I don't. I don't even have one," I retorted, still sliding my fingers over the cold keys. "Ada has Tuvok, who made her, and Greg and Eddie, who will take care of her and keep her warm and teach her to read."

"And you have Kathryn – "

"My _mama_, Tom. That's different."

He continued doggedly. "You have Kathryn, who made you, and your father, who she must have loved very much. And who would be so proud of you if he knew you, because you're smart and pretty and brave."

"Tom." I tried to put ice in my voice.

"And a lot like your mother." He put his chin on my shoulder and hugged me. I stopped tapping the dark buttons. "And you have me, Beatrice. I'm your father just as much as Greg is Ada's, because I'll keep you safe and warm and teach you anything you need to know."

This was the moment, and Tom, who had never lied to me, the person to ask. "Who made me? Who would have been my father, without the crash?"

He let out all his breath at once, like he had been waiting for exactly that. The silence sank in, and he hugged me even tighter. "I don't know, Bea. Your mother never told us."

"You never even _guessed_?"

"Honestly?" He thought a moment, perhaps wondering how much gossip to share with a nine-year-old captain's daughter. The seconds stretched, and I was impatient.

"If she loved him so much, like you say and Naomi said, they you would have known. Everyone knows about you and B'Elanna. About Eddie and Greg."

"I know it seems crazy, sweetheart, but sometimes people don't like to admit that they're in love. It took B'Elanna and I a long time to tell each other, or anyone else, and your mother is more private than most people." He sighed again. "Isn't this something you should ask her?"

I twisted around to glare at him. "That's a great idea, Tom. 'Oh, by the by, mama, you've never ever said a word about my father to me or anyone else, so I was wondering, which of the dead bodies below decks was him?' Is that going to go over well?"

"I see your point." He shifted so that I could sit sideways on his lap, clasping his arms around my waist. "Well, Bea, I'll tell you the truth. I have guesses, but I don't really trust any of them. I don't know who your father is, and I don't know why your mother won't tell you. But I promise, I'm here to be as much your father as he would be, if he could. And I'm sure that Greg or Joe or Eddie or Tuvok would say the same."

I let him hug me again and get back to piloting _Voyager_ through an asteroid field, but just like with Naomi, it wasn't the love I doubted. I knew that I had a family who would care for me; I knew my mother loved me with a crushing, almost desperate completeness. It was my own history I didn't know.

* * *

The trouble with a dead starship is that it's not very good at being anything else. Kilometers of hallways and access tubes, tons of bulkheads and circuitry – it all has a structure and serves a purpose that's obsolete. _Voyager _may have been an engineering marvel, but her propulsion systems and shield generators produced no heat; first-rate sensors and state-of-the-art weaponry couldn't keep us fed. She's empty, echoing, and purposeless. But just like she can't be anything but a starship, her crew can't stop being her crew, even when there are no red alerts, no first contacts, no malfunctions, and no strange new worlds.

Thanks to B'Elanna, I know what _Voyager_ was. It's hard to see the humming, whole ship through the frost, but I've spent enough time below decks, in the wreckage of engineering and the undisturbed silence of sickbay. Somewhere between the twisted hologrid and the shadowy depths of the crushed shuttlebay, I got to know _Voyager_. She's still my mother's ship, but she's shown me a few secrets.

Ada and Harry never went below; the darkness and the deepened cold was unnerving, and the frozen bodies of the dead scared them. Zayek wasn't afraid, but couldn't see the appeal of leaving the shelter of the bridge if there were no imaginary enemies to be conquered. Even the adults tended to limit their time away from deck one, climbing down through the Jefferies tubes only to salvage some piece of machinery that might be useful. I can only imagine what it must be like, to tiptoe through a dark ship where the air is almost too thin to breathe, when you knew her bright and full of friends. All the same, I liked the ringing, abandoned corridors and the forgotten corners.

If my mother had ever asked why I spent so much time away from the bridge, I probably would have said that the quiet of the ship was peaceful, and I just wanted to get away from the other kids for a while. But that wasn't the whole truth: the nine decks that were left told me stories that even Tom wouldn't. Love affairs and secret hobbies, families left behind and irrational worries - I explored quarters and stations trying to learn about the people who had lived and worked there. They were my family, too, and I wanted to be able to share their stories, since they never would. And I had another aim I never named: if I could discover _Voyager_'s crew, perhaps I could learn a little more about her captain.

Even the bodies didn't bother me. The glacier was impenetrable, and the energy required for cremation or burial equally impossible. In the weeks after the crash, the survivors had instead carried the bodies of their friends one by one and laid them along the corridors, not sure then if they would need the quarters or cargo bays for something else later. There was no rhyme or reason to the arrangement; science and command, crewmen and lieutenants, Starfleet and Maquis were all mingled. In places, the survivors had tried to let lovers and friends stay together in death, and here and there little shrines had been set up; the one by Samantha Wildman grew each year that passed, the only evidence that serene and mature Naomi still missed her mother terribly.

After I gleaned all I could from their quarters, I turned to the crew themselves for their stories. I spent weeks pacing the corridors, studying each face: was it kind? Lined with smiles or sobriety? Was Aimee Lang the kind of ensign who played practical jokes? Did Tal Celes like her holonovels to be mysteries or romances? I tried to see their histories in their final expressions, preserved forever under a dusting of frost.

I looked, too, for a broad brow like mine, for dark hair and golden skin, for a man who might smile with dimples like mine. There were several possibilities based purely on coloring, a few more who had my build; none had both, but what could I tell from a frozen corpse laced with snow? None of them had any keepsakes laid beside them, and the carpet of frost was undisturbed except for passing footprints. If one of these men was my father, my mother had never gone to kneel beside him, never written him a letter and slid it up against his heart.

But my footprints weren't the only ones that marked the corridors: there was another set of precise steps that I followed around the empty decks. I knew they weren't left over from salvage missions, because the adults always took the Jefferies tubes directly to their destinations, and because they were always new, cut into every day's new layer of ice.

I know that they were my mother's; I knew the first time I ventured alone among the silent dead. She is the captain of the dead and the living, and she is responsible to both; I've heard her say as much. As long as she was with her ship, with her crew, she wouldn't step down, and every day did all in her power to lead and love them, even if it was just to give each crewman a few minutes of her time.

But a promise like that can't be made without a price, and what it took her to keep living is immense. More than once I found her seated in the captain's chair, her gaze a million kilometers beyond the dead viewscreen, one hand absently stretched out toward the commander's empty place. When she came back from walking the corridors alone, she didn't say a word, just held me close while I read or studied or tried to rewire dead power cells. I've woken to feel her body shaking against mine, and I've heard her whisper names into the darkness. Some of them I know are lying below, but others I'd never heard before: was she repeating the names of her family? Her past lovers? The places she'd been, or the battles she'd fought? I don't know, but it's not something I can ask, and I have learned to be content with the mystery.


	4. Barriers

**Winter's Child, continued.

* * *

**

It's the nature of children, to accept and adapt to their surroundings, but teenagers are better at rebellion than acceptance. At four, at seven, I knew that there was a world beyond the ice, but I didn't imagine myself going there; in our games we rebuilt the ship and resurrected the crew, but we never explored an alien world or placed ourselves at Starfleet headquarters. I wanted to see sunshine, nebulae, oceans, cities, and to hear orchestras or the babble of a thousand people all talking at once, but I didn't think I ever would. It wasn't part of my world.

As a small child, I met the bounds of my world with mute resignation, but as I grew up I was increasingly frustrated by how close and firm those boundaries were. _Voyager_ began to feel smaller, and what the crew had to teach answered fewer of my questions. I got to know all of those endless rooms below, and the faces of the dead were familiar. Hard as I looked, I could find no new corners, and I started taking risks to uncover more. I didn't tell anyone when I crawled through the crushed remains of the warp core, knowing that I could easily contract antimatter radiation sickness if any of the physical containment systems had breached. I worked for hours to open the airlocks and escape pod ports, so that I could slip out between the hull and the ice. Even when it yielded no useful information, I fought for each new inch.

But with each centimeter of hull, scraped and scarred beneath my hands, my world got smaller. Each minute spent crouching in engineering waiting for a brief flare of the matter/antimatter reaction took another wonder from those I could discover there. It sank in that I would never have another world to explore: the dome of the bridge would forever be my sky.

* * *

The year I was twelve, Beth died. Her creeping paralysis had made it harder and harder for her to digest anything; she was weakened by malnutrition and slowly losing her dexterity. One night, she simply left her gel pack outside her blankets when she drifted off to sleep. Without any nerve response in her extremities to alert her, the cold stopped her heart, and she never woke up.

The crew had gathered on the bridge for two weddings, and crowded into Jefferies tubes for four births, but this was the first funeral in thirteen years. We wrapped Beth in her blankets and carried her below decks. It was my mother who knelt by her, uncovered her face and whispered, "I am so, so sorry, Beth." She slipped a single apple blossom between Beth's icy hands before turning to us. "We know why we are gathered here today, but that makes it no less shocking, no less heartbreaking."

During the service, I watched the flower between Beth's pale fingers. It was a hybrid plant, a cross that if let develop would yield a small, bitter fruit, and away from the lights it began to freeze. The green-white petals were shot through with dark streaks of ice, and I imagined that if I touched it now, it would shatter.

Afterwards, my mother stood for a few moments more by the body, already white and dusted with frost, then headed off down the corridor away from the rest of the crew. I watched her go, and felt a hand on my shoulder. "She should come above with us," I said aloud, reading the anger and guilt in her sharp steps.

"She needs to grieve," Tom said quietly. Behind us, the last of the mourners climbed into the Jefferies tube.

"She's not grieving." I was surprised to hear the sharp edge in my voice. "She's blaming herself." I turned and met his eyes; they were such a bright blue, and his cheeks were streaked with frozen tears.

"Don't be too angry with her, Beatrice. She doesn't know how to stop." His hand slipped from my shoulder, and he turned away. "Don't stay too long," he said, before folding himself through the door.

"It'll kill her," I whispered. It was hard, to break the solitude that surrounded her, but for the first time I broke it. As she disappeared around the corner, I hurried after her, my footsteps thudding in the snow. I wasn't sure what I was going to say to her; I knew that I couldn't understand the burden she still carried, and I couldn't ask her to set it down. At that moment, though, I could no more leave her alone than I could set her free.

She heard my steps, but she didn't turn around, and when I caught up with her, she didn't say a word. Together, we walked the halls with a slow, measured pace that let her look into every face. When we rounded the deck, I followed her down to the next, and the next after that. Step by step, fabric rustled around us, layers and layers that shielded us from the cold; our breath crackled in the thin air.

It wasn't until we'd passed every last body and returned to Beth's side that she spoke. She sank to her heels, and without looking up at me, murmured, "You should go up, Bea."

"I'm staying as long as you are."

As a captain's daughter, I suspect I'm immune to the glares that reduce junior officers to jelly. Lucky for me, because a green ensign in that corridor with me might not have survived: I had stepped into her most private pain. I looked down at her without flinching; in the dim light, her eyes were dark and piercing. The shadows slid over the hollows of her cheeks, and though she was thin and tired I saw something in her interrupted grief that she'd never let me see before.

And to my surprise, she smiled, a wry, crooked grin that transformed her features. "Not going to leave me alone, are you?" I had never seen a smile look so sad.

"No," I said quietly, crouching down too. "I think I've done that enough."

She sighed. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you took lessons in this, Bea, and from someone other than Tom and Tuvok." A long silence fell between us, and when she spoke again, I wasn't sure she expected an answer. "What did I do to make you such a grown-up?"

"You didn't do that. The cold did." I shrugged, and sank down to sit on my heels. "You can't blame yourself for everything."

She fell sideways to sit too, her legs folded beneath her. "The cold," she said, and her voice was brittle. "The cold, and the crash, and a foolhardy decision I made for all of us." She gestured up and down the hall, and I got the sense that she was talking to Beth, not me. "I didn't have to. I could have ordered everyone to dismantle the drive, and they would have done it without question. But I – I just wanted to get home so badly. I thought it was worth the risk, but I never thought that I'd be the one to live."

I didn't say anything. When they told the story, no one had ever blamed her for the crash, but I knew that the responsibility was ultimately the captain's. There was nothing to be said, in the face of protocol.

"No. I thought that I was risking my life as much as theirs. Either we'd all make it, or none of us would, but we'd be together in the attempt. And instead… well. Instead I get to live on as the selfish, wrong-headed captain who put her needs ahead of the crew's."

"You're hardly living on in luxury," I said softly, wondering what needs she imagined she had that the crew didn't. Hadn't they all wanted to get home?

"But I'm living, Beatrice," she said. "I'm living, and it cost their lives to get me here." She reached out, and folded my icy fingers in her own. "And then I did something even stupider: I brought you here, too. I gave this life to a child who will outlive me, and never see the stars."

I swallowed, hard. She was honest, but private: though she answered every question put to her, told me the unvarnished truth, I studied silence at her knee. To hear express so bluntly the anger that I nursed was surprising, and made that anger seem childish. "Maybe I will," I said.

She closed her eyes, composing herself, and turned her face toward mine. "I hope so, Bea. But if you never do, promise me that you forgive me."

I almost asked, for what? But I didn't need to force her to say it; she didn't have to admit that she would rather be a childless captain of a living crew than my mother and captain to the dead. She didn't have to say that she thought that being a child here, on an icy, dead ship, was worse than not being born. If she had said that she regretted my birth, she would have thought that I doubted how much she loved me.

"Of course I do," I said, and in that moment, it was true. She didn't have to know that I understood perfectly, and she couldn't have understood that to me, her regret only proved her love.

* * *

Though communications had never been her expertise, B'Elanna took on Beth's projects, plunking herself down about four months later in the corner of the conference room where Beth had worked. It took only a few hours of scrutinizing Beth's equations and examining her circuitry before B'Elanna walked across the room to where Joe, Naomi, Eddie and I were preparing dinner. She gently set a device down on the table.

"She did it," she said, and her voice was almost fragile. "She must have connected every interlink by hand, without a hyperspanner, but – except for the power cell, which is going to take some creative engineering – she built a transceiver." She sank into one of the chairs, staring at the little machine. It was a mess, made up of pieces and wires snatched from _Voyager_'s useless systems, but I could almost see what B'Elanna saw. It was good work, and might just have been our miracle.

Joe cautiously picked it up and began to run his hands over the connections. "I wonder how she dealt with the targeting problem," he said, to no one in particular, then turned the device over and laughed. Embedded in the wires was Beth's commbadge. "Brilliant. That would adjust the carrier wave to Starfleet frequencies, and boost its range."

"And preserve power, if it's not sending on every channel at once," Eddie said, interested now. "Can we get it to transmit?"

"We'd better," B'Elanna said grimly. Her eyes fixed on the machine in Joe's hands, she said softly, "I wonder if she knew how close she was."

"She must have. She was a good engineer," Eddie said. He pushed himself to his feet and walked around the table, dropping a hand on her shoulder as he headed back out toward the garden. "It was an accident, B'Elanna. She didn't do it on purpose."

"I'd like to believe that." B'Elanna leaned on her elbows, twisting her fingers together. Naomi and I glanced at each other as we shelled peas. Beth had worked in engineering, and had been trying to manually align the manifolds on the chief engineer's orders; her spine had been injured when the ship set down and the nearest console had exploded, sending debris everywhere. In B'Elanna's thin, lined face and mournful brown eyes, I saw an echo of my mother's grief, and wondered how she atoned.

It took several months more to build a power cell that wouldn't overload the delicate device but would still transmit through the ice. B'Elanna grew more and more frustrated with the limited technology at her disposal; standard Starfleet instrumentation used up enormous amounts of power, and could, due to the efficiency and cleanliness of the antimatter reaction. But with a cold warp core, even the easiest things were difficult, and over the years the lights, supplemental oxygen production, and Joe's cooking devices had been switched from the ship's power grid to stored energy from the dynamo. Now, calibrating the cell to emit a steady SOS with a very unsteady power source took all B'Elanna's patience and creativity.

We all gathered to turn it on and watched in silence as B'Elanna connected the power cell to Beth's transmitter. A miniscule yellow light on the transceiver lit up, and we stood for several minutes watching it blink, this tiny beacon that was the first complete device made with the ruined computer core and the shorted circuitry and was our first connection to the rest of the galaxy.

We knew it might only transmit as far as the planet's star, that we could be in an uncharted and empty region with no passing ships, that we could still be in the Delta Quadrant for all we knew. We threw a party anyway.

For a few bright weeks, I was sure it was all over. The scale of the universe was beyond me, and it seemed impossible that some ship wouldn't wander by and pick up the steady beeping of our signal. I paid particular attention to Tuvok's lessons, sure that I would soon be in a Federation school, and Zayek and I abandoned our games to speculate wildly about life on Earth.

The adults, though, didn't seem as positive. They checked the transceiver logs whenever they passed, too, and they seemed to think of our rescue as inevitable. But they weren't happy about it, exactly. Oh, they told more stories about their families and their homes, and Eddie couldn't hide his excitement at introducing his mother to Ada. It was with muted trepidation, though, that Greg mentioned his sons, my mother Starfleet, or Tuvok his wife, and in the face of those responsibilities the compromises they had made to stay alive stood out sharply.

But weeks, and then months, passed, and there was never a blip on the transceiver. The galaxy slowly shrank again, until the Federation was the stuff of stories and the deck ten the furthest reaches of the world. Slowly, the excitement and the tension receded, until it faded into the dim rhythm of chores and meals and shivering nights. There were classes, crises, and a new baby; I had no thoughts to spare for the remote possibility of rescue. By my fourteenth birthday, checking the transceiver daily was a routine that hardly anyone kept up. Except for occasional calibrations to the carrier wave, we stopped trying to find the universe, busy with survival.

It never occurred to us that the universe might find us on its own.


	5. Salvage

**Winter's Child, continued.

* * *

**

It's easy, in memory, to claim that I knew when I woke up that morning that it would be different. The truth is, though, that it wasn't: I still snuggled into the blankets, chasing the last warmth, and the light that filtered through the ice was the same dim blue. We ate hard tack bread and applesauce that morning while my mother drank bitter black tea. She was designing a miniaturized warp reactor, which was insane considering the dangers of antimatter and requisite energy to ignite it, but kept her scientist's brain busy. Zayek and I spent almost three hours calculating the entropy and enthalpy for the same reaction under her distracted eye, while Ada and Harry tried to prove that water freezing was spontaneous at zero degrees centigrade.

She finally released us when we announced that the warp reaction bent the rules of physical chemistry and Harry and Ada concluded that water did, in fact, freeze. Ada seemed annoyed that she'd had to go through all that math to prove what she considered the one constant of her universe, but my mother was excited by the ideas that she'd come up with for containment. Over lunch, she corralled the other adults into a salvaging trip, eager to start experimenting. Everyone went, ostensibly to gather supplies but really to keep my mother from crawling inside the warp core in her enthusiasm.

Zayek and I stayed on deck one with the younger children. I had wanted to go below, too, eager to prove that I was old enough for salvage and knew my way around the plasma manifolds, but Tom had handed me his infant daughter and whispered that he considered her care much more important than rooting around dead consoles.

"Zayek can handle Ada and Harry, but a nine-week-old quarter-Klingon is a pretty serious charge," he said, and my annoyance at being left behind faded as she fell asleep against me. Miral may have inherited her mother's ridges, but she had a gentle personality and breathtakingly blue eyes, and as the others built a fort beneath the table in the conference room I curled up behind ops with a gel pack on my lap and a book between my gloved fingers, glad to have a few moments to myself. With Miral warm against my chest and the dim lighting making the words on the page swim, it wasn't long before I drifted off.

I woke suddenly to the screech of a door as it was forced open. It was the door on the far side of the bridge, by the ready room, the one that we hardly ever used; the corridors beyond it were as dark and frozen as the rest of the ship, since the garden stopped abruptly halfway around the deck. I spent my life with one small group of people, and I knew immediately that the boots crunching across the frost didn't belong to any of them.

When I imagined that moment, I had always thought that we would run to greet our rescuers, but now that the moment was there I was unaccountably nervous. What if they proved hostile? _Voyager_ was a rich salvage prize for a space-faring race, even in its current state, and a fourteen-year-old refugee wasn't much a diplomat.

After perhaps a minute of stillness, the stranger murmured something and opened a comm. channel. "She's not here," he said without preamble.

"_What do you mean, she's not there?_"

"That. None of them are here." His voice was deep and controlled, but a little desperate, too. "Do you think that – "

"_Hold on. I can't access the Doc or find the mobile emitter, but he can wait. Tess, do you think you could –_ " I heard a humming, and realized that it had to be a transporter beam of some kind. A second set of unfamiliar feet explored the bridge, followed by a crash, as though someone had punched the wall. "After all this – all this time, all this work – "

"All those broken laws," the first man adds grimly. "Do you think the ship was found by scavengers?"

"Out here? There isn't a trade route that passes within a billion kilometers of this planet."

"But the consoles are in pieces." I imagined what the bridge would look like to strangers: bits and pieces of bulkheads and circuitry from all over the ship, strewn across the lower deck.

"If that were true, though, the crew would still be here. What use do scavengers have for bodies?" They hadn't been through decks two, three, or four, then, if they hadn't seen the crew. "I didn't see a single person down by Sickbay, and I know that the labs were staffed that day." He punched the wall again, his voice bitter with disappointment. "How are we going to do this without her?"

I may have been too confused and frightened to speak, but Miral had no such qualm. The unfamiliar voices and my agitation woke her up, and after an uncertain moment she let out a wail. I dropped my book and hastily tried to quiet her, but it was too late.

"Did you hear that?" the second man said in a low voice, and before I had a chance to stand up he strode across the bridge and hauled me out from behind the ops console. He held me against the wall with a strong but shaking hand. "What are you doing here?"

I took in his graying hair, human features, and heavy environmental suit. "I should ask you the same," I hissed back, trying to protect Miral's head. Over his shoulder, I saw Zayek peer out from an access tube on the main bridge, then slip back inside.

The first man, larger and with a faded blue-black tattoo over his left eye, pulled his companion back. "What are you doing?" he demanded. "That's a baby under there, and she's a child!"

"She's a squatter!" he roared, physically restrained but still angry. "Where are the bodies? What have you done with them?" He tried to jerk out of the other man's grip. "How long have you been here?"

Miral was shrieking in earnest, and I moved out from behind the console, trying to quiet her and get the corridor to my back. "My whole life!"

That stopped him cold. I bounced the baby gently, and her wails faded to whimpers; the older man watched me, his grip tightening on his friend's arm. When he spoke, his voice was soft, but deadly intense. "And how long is that, exactly?"

No point in lying. I raised my chin defiantly. "Fourteen years."

His hand dropped from my would-be attacker's arm, but neither of them moved. Neither of them seemed sure what to do next, and the tattooed man backed down onto the main deck of the bridge. I pressed my advantage, stepping forward. "So I'm going to ask you again: what are you doing here?"

His back turned, he stared at the empty gray viewscreen. "Looking for you, I suppose." He sounded completely defeated. "We should start over, I think. What's your name?"

"Bea."

"That's it?"

I didn't answer. His companion still looked furious, if a little bewildered; it was clear that I upset his plans, and that he wasn't going to trust me. I hoped that Zayek had gone to find the salvage crew, or at least had made sure that Harry and Ada were safely hidden. This was hardly the rescue I had imagined.

"Is there anyone else here, Bea?" I just looked at him steadily. He raised an eyebrow. "Come on; you're a little young to be a mother, and in any case this isn't the kind of place you can survive on your own. How long have your people been sheltering here? I suppose you could have found the ship when it crashed. Were you trapped by the glacier?"

I didn't think he'd believe me if I said that I was the captain's daughter, so I said nothing. The younger man spun on his heel, pacing the upper deck of the bridge; the one with the tattoo sank into the commander's chair, tapping at the central console. Over Miral's whimpering and the crunch of the second man's pacing, I only heard a few words in my mother's voice: " – with distinction and valor."

Cautiously, I followed him down to the lower deck, but he wasn't paying any attention to me. He was gazing instead at the console and the empty captain's chair. I didn't know what to make of it: who were these men? What had they expected to find, and why had they been so sure? He seemed to see my mother in the final transmission, and his expression was distant, intimate. It felt rude to interrupt.

And then suddenly, it clicked. "You're Chakotay," I said to him, sitting back against the conn. "And you're Harry Kim." There was no question in my voice: I was sure. I had their attention now. "You came to find _Voyager,_ and you expected her to be dead and empty."

"And she isn't?" Chakotay was whispering.

Again, I didn't answer. "You expected to find the crew frozen where they fell, everything intact, dead. Didn't you scan? What did you think, when you saw life support running at partial power? Why didn't you look for lifesigns?"

"It didn't occur to us," Harry Kim said. "The ship is buried under a glacier. We looked for the alloy in the hull, but not for organic material. When I saw the faint energy signature, I thought that the power grid hadn't been as thoroughly damaged as we'd expected." He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was almost pleading. "No one could possibly live here."

"It isn't a matter of 'possible,'" I said, and his dark eyes met mine over Chakotay's head. "Just 'true.'"

* * *

When my mother strode onto the bridge a few minutes later, she was every inch the captain. True, she wore skirts and coats made of environmental suits and blankets; she was gaunt and thin, and hadn't had a proper meal or cup of coffee in years. But she had her little crew at her back, and on her face an expression that had bested the Borg.

And melted promptly when she saw who stood before her. Astonishment, joy, and anger warred her face, and anger won. After a stunned silence, she almost growled, "And just _what_ took you gentlemen so long?"

Harry Kim stood with his back to me, so I could only guess his shock from his stillness, but Chakotay was still seated in the commander's chair. At my mother's voice, his lips parted very slightly. The expression on his face was hard to read; it was as though she was water, and he was drowning in thirst. When he finally pushed himself to his feet and turned to face her, he could barely speak. "Kathryn."

Her fury was undiminished. "Bea, are you all right?" she asked sharply, and I nodded, beating a hasty retreat to her side. The rest of the survivors were frozen behind her, wanting neither to violate her authority or, I suspect, able to believe what they saw.

It was Kim who broke the stalemate. He stumbled forward, dropping to his knees before all of them, and mumbled to the deck plating, "I'm so sorry, Captain. I – I've spent every moment since that day apologizing to you. You trusted me, and I killed – I – I'm so sorry."

B'Elanna took in a sharp breath. "Kathryn," she murmured, and my mother stepped back, her face a mask, rigid and sad. B'Elanna rushed around her and sank down beside Kim. "It's okay, Harry. We forgave you a long time ago." She tucked her hand beneath his chin and forced him to look at her. "We even named our first child for you." I could see as clearly as she could that it was my mother's forgiveness he wanted, but he let a weak smile onto his face and swallowed hard. "She is right, though," B'Elanna added, pulling him to his feet. "You two did take an awfully long time."

Kim searched her face, then turned to Tom, Greg, Madelein, and Joe. When he reached my mother, he cast his eyes down again. "It'll never be enough, Captain, I know, but – "

"I don't doubt your sincerity, Harry," she said, and her voice was soft and sure. She didn't give an inch. "But the last fifteen years have marked me with regrets, too. It'll take me a while." She relaxed her stance, though, and suddenly it was a reunion, with Harry embracing everyone, clearly rejoicing to be back in the arms of his family. Zayek and I slipped outside the tangle, not sure that we belonged there, and we weren't the only ones: Chakotay still stood on the other side of the railing, his eyes on my mother, the cool center of the storm.

B'Elanna noticed, too, and made her way to where we stood. "Where are the others, Zayek? Harry should meet his namesake." Zayek ran off to get the younger children out of hiding, and B'Elanna followed my gaze to Chakotay.

"He hasn't said a word," I said.

"Well, he's a quiet guy. And he never thought he'd see his captain again." She let her own excitement slip into her voice then, and I looked up at her and smiled, just in time to see a sudden and smooth transformation in her features from amusement to astonishment. She glanced away quickly, towards Chakotay. "How could I not – " she murmured, then said aloud, "Excuse me, Bea."

B'Elanna swung under the railing and laid her arm on Chakotay's shoulder, and I turned around to find her expression mirrored in my mother's. "Come on," she said. "Let's go where it's warm." She took my hand, and with the baby stirring restlessly against me we walked toward the conference room.

* * *

Old habits are hard to break; within fifteen minutes, it had turned into a staff meeting. There may have been a living ship in orbit, but when my mother shed her outer layers and sank into the chair at the head of the table, everyone followed suit. We children quickly snagged the warmest seats, the low benches Maddie had built between Joe's oven and the windows, and I unwrapped Miral so that she could wriggle on my lap. The most senior officers got the chairs, and everyone else sank onto an improvised stool or leaned up against the wall. The survivors couldn't take their eyes off their rescuers, and a few couldn't wipe silly smiles from their faces.

Still, Harry and Chakotay's eyes kept flicking over to the corner where we sat, and they seemed distracted by the jury-rigged heaters and cooking devices lined against the walls. It was my mother who finally broke the silence, saying, "We haven't all been introduced, have we?" She looked over her shoulder at Zayek and I. "Harry, Chakotay, may I present our newest –" a minute pause "- crew members. Harry Owen Paris; the infant is his sister, Miral Kathryn Torres. Zayek Swinn, and Ada Ayala-Matteo." Harry Kim couldn't suppress an affectionate snort at that, but the somber Ada merely stared back at him. "And of course, Beatrice."

I nodded awkwardly, but I wasn't the only one to notice the judicious shortening of my name. Tuvok raised an eyebrow, B'Elanna pursed her lips, and my mother cleared her throat. "Beatrice Janeway," she amended.

However unexpected Zayek or little Miral might be, I was clearly the curiosity. The feeling wasn't a pleasant one, and I looked down at the baby in my arms to avoid Chakotay's searching gaze. "Kathryn," he ventured, and then chuckled, as though aware that that was all he'd managed to say so far. "She's – quite a bit like you."

I blushed, remembering our first interaction, but my mother's blush was deeper. "Only good qualities, I hope."

Although there was a room full of survivors, he didn't look at anyone else. "Of course." Looking around, I guessed that their banter didn't come as a surprise; Joe rolled his eyes at them, and I caught Tom with a grin. B'Elanna's expression, though, was troubled, and she leaned in toward her husband, murmuring inaudibly into his ear. When she pulled away, his eyes flicked toward me, and he drew in a quick breath.

"Finding you here," Chakotay said, tearing his eyes from his captain's and looking around the room, "makes everything much more complex."

"You didn't expect to find us?" My mother's voice was low, surprised. "What, then, are you doing here?"

"We expected to find _Voyager_. But we thought – we assumed you were all dead on impact, or shortly thereafter. It's been fifteen years. And there are twenty meters of ice overhead!"

"You still haven't answered my question, Chakotay." She pronounced each syllable carefully, almost delicately, each consonant crisp and precise. Cha-ko-tay.

"We're here – we _were_ here to change history, Kathyrn." He was speaking only to her, and had been, since the moment she strode onto what never stopped being her bridge.

"Is this going to have me worrying about temporal mechanics?" My mother leaned forward, and I wondered that he had been absent from all the stories she told. She never made him sound important, but the spark in her tone and posture betrayed her: he was very important to her, as an officer and as a friend.

"That depends on whether we go through with it," Kim put in, as though impatient. "When we thought you were all dead, the plan was to use Seven's transceiver to send ourselves a message. I – well, I sent you all the wrong correction, fifteen years ago, but I've worked out the right one."

"A message to yesterday," B'Elanna murmured. She absently pulled her gloves off, turning to Tom with a distant expression. "If we'd had the right correction, we might have been able to stabilize the drive." I could tell that she was running over those last few minutes in her head. "Maybe…"

"We have the means, but – " Kim swallowed. "Obviously, it changes everything that there are survivors, and children, here."

My mother nodded. "Obviously," she echoed, but we all knew she was saying something very different.

"Captain," Tuvok said, "I feel I should remind you – "

"I don't need reminding, Tuvok."

"Kathryn," Chakotay broke in. "It's not an option anymore. We can't risk making the timeline any worse. What if we made an error and all of you died, instead of just most of you? Or if the Flyer didn't survive, and Harry and I weren't here to find you?" He tore his eyes from her, and he focused for a moment on little Harry, who was tiptoeing around the table toward his parents. "What about them? These new lives that won't exist?"

"That didn't bother you before, Chakotay," Kim murmured. "Countless lives will change, and we can't predict which children may or may not be born. We decided it was worth the price, a long time ago."

"I know that, and I thought I could live with it - but _these_ five children will cease to exist!"

"Well, four of them will, anyway," Tom put in dryly. Everyone whipped around to look at him, but from where I sat behind the captain's chair I could tell that it was my mother's eyes he met. "Bea was conceived before the crash, wasn't she?"


	6. Secrets

**Winter's Child, continued.

* * *

**

There was a ringing silence.

Tom was the only person I'd ever asked outright, and he'd told me then that he didn't know how to ask. But he must have figured it out, because in his voice I heard a challenge, and he was willing to break her privacy and solitude for it. And yet, I couldn't help thinking that he already knew the answer. His voice was so calm, so sure, and from her rigid posture I knew my mother suspected the same.

Still, she didn't answer. I knew her well enough to imagine the way she would clench her jaw and the lidded gaze she would level on Tom, but I could also imagine how vulnerable she was underneath. All eyes were fixed on her or Tom, all but four: Chakotay's, and Naomi's. The former commander was staring at her hands on the table, unable or unwilling to enter into their contest of wills. And Naomi looked directly at me.

She was leaning against the far wall; in the Alpha Quadrant she might have been a cadet, but here she was still a teenager and a civilian_, _outside the staff meeting. Her expression was sad, and her lips quirked into a smile when my eyes met hers. She ran a hand over her cranial spikes, then tucked a stray coppery wisp behind her ear. It was one of her nervous quirks, but the deliberation with which she turned her gaze on Chakotay made it somehow momentous. I looked back at her, uncomprehending, but she nodded toward him again, and bit her lip.

I studied him, trying to connect the two in my head: this somber, dark-eyed man and Naomi's Ktarian spikes. He was marked by sorrow just as we were; it was written in the lines on the muted gold of his skin, the grey in his hair, the wrinkles etched between his eyes, and he sat with an intense stillness just then. I took in the square line of his jaw, the contours of his profile. And then I understood.

High cheekbones, broad shoulders, wide brow; his left hand resting on the table's edge was strong and solid. My own hands cradled Miral's head, the slender fingers so like my mother's, the open palm always such a mystery.

It wasn't possible, and yet, as the seconds stretched, I searched him. I noticed in him my ears, the quirk of my eyebrow, the suggestion of my dimpled cheeks. The gentle creases around his mouth, the flare of his nostrils – it was all familiar. The more I looked, the more and saw, and I had to wonder how no one had noticed that I was growing up with Chakotay's features. I finished the sentence B'Elanna had begun on the bridge: how could she not have seen this before?

I nodded again to Naomi across the room, and she pursed her lips in an uncertain smile. I couldn't look back to the silent standoff; it was only a matter of time before someone turned to me, and I knew that it would be obvious to anyone who knew me well, Tom or Joe or Maddie or B'Elanna, that my world had changed. After fourteen years choosing silence, this accidental knowledge seemed like the worst of betrayals, and her stubborn refusal to tell even now made her fragile privacy that much more my responsibility.

Zayek's gentle touch broke into my panic. "Bea," he mouthed, the sharp angles of his face sharper in the dim corner. "Are you – "

"It's him," I breathed, abruptly gathering up the baby and handing her to Zayek. Utterly bewildered, he raised Miral to his shoulder, supporting her with one arm and reaching out to grab my hand with the other. "No," I said, more loudly. "No, I – "

But there was nothing I could say without breaking her silence. Everyone was turned toward me, their expressions startled and sad, everyone except my mother, who still hadn't moved. I stood, and without thinking retreated, squeezed out through the frozen doors and almost ran across the bridge.

I wasn't thinking; there was nothing to think about. I knew who my father was, and as I slipped into the garden, pushing myself between the cargo containers, I tried to suppress that knowledge. It was cold, and my hair was uncovered, but I didn't shiver, because I was working to forget the set of his jaw, the curve of his lips. The earth brown of his eyes.

I knew who my father was, but hidden among the green leaves I tried my hardest not to; it was the only thing my mother had ever asked of me.

* * *

It was ten minutes before I heard footsteps in the corridor. I closed my eyes against the bright lamps and thought firmly, _I won't tell. Even if it's her, I won't talk about it._ All she ever asked was that she be enough for me, and she had been. I wouldn't ask her any more.

But it wasn't her; it was Tom who pushed his way between the leaves, offering me a blanket as he sat down. I stared directly ahead, at the delicate buds of a cornflower, and with a sigh he draped the grey polymer fabric over my knees. He slipped in the narrow space and thudded abruptly to a seat, but he just leaned up against the cargo container.

"You asked me once, Bea, whether I ever guessed. You wanted to know why your mother wouldn't tell you or anyone else about – about someone she loved enough to have a child with." I hugged my knees tighter, still not looking at Tom. "I didn't know then, and I couldn't imagine why she wouldn't tell you, but I think I can now. Do you still want to know?"

Against my will, I shivered and glanced at him. In the bright light of the garden, his eyes shone blue, and I couldn't face the sympathy I found there. I said nothing.

"I think you should hear the one story your mother can't tell you, and I think you should know that she were able, she would have told you a long time ago." He shifted slightly, and clutched his sleeves down around his hands for warmth. "It's not the kind of secret you keep because it hurts people, or it's against the rules to tell. And it's not the kind you keep because it embarrasses you. Nothing could make us respect Kathryn less, and she knows that.

"No, Bea, it's the kind that you keep because you're afraid. Love is like that, you're afraid it's true or that it's not, and either way it'll hurt more than you can stand. I think your mother never told because she thought that way she'd never have to face the hurt."

"But she _is_ hurt." The words escaped me; I was disarmed by his openness. The idea that my mother was pretending away her pain shook me, because I'd never known anyone who faced the truth the way she did. "She doesn't say it out loud, but she is, Tom, about – _him,_ and about the crash – and –"

"I know that. I didn't say that it always worked." A deep breath. "The other thing about love, Bea, is that it's a lousy secret. It always gets out. You made her tell."

"I didn't!" I buried my head in my arms. "I didn't say –"

"Not today, Bea," he said hurriedly, reaching out and putting his arm across my shoulders. "Kathryn didn't say a word, and you didn't tell her secret for her. That's not what I mean.

"No, from the day she knew she carried you, the fierce way she loved you, that told us. Kathryn would have loved any child in her care, but there was something in the way she studied and sheltered you – you were her last link to something more important than any of us guessed, and she couldn't hide it." He held up a hand, stilling my protests. "It wasn't your fault. Not at all. And she could have told us, and given us the chance to be there for her."

"But she didn't. She never – she never said – "

Tom sighed. "No. She let out half her secret – that she had lost something very, very precious to her – but she never named it."

"Why not?"

He didn't answer right away, but pursed his lips and stared unseeing into the leaves. "Let me start from the beginning. I don't think you can understand why it was so hard for her to say the words aloud without knowing a little about her past.

"Your mother – she's Starfleet to the core. Her career was always the most important thing to her, I'd bet, and when she talks about the upholding the principles of the Federation, she really means it, in a way I think only the best captains do. It's what always mattered to her, and it's what she _chose_.

"I was a 'Fleet brat too; my dad was an admiral, and I'm sure I attended just as many stuffy functions as she did as a kid. But I can just imagine it: while I was sneaking under the table to tie shoelaces together, bored out of my mind, her eyes were shining. She wanted to be one of those admirals, one of those captains they told stories about, who'd matched wits and torpedoes with the enemies of humanism and decency, and won. I didn't know her before _Voyager_, but I'm guessing that she laid everything she had on the line to become that kind of captain.

"She lost her father, early in her Starfleet career; I don't remember her, but I was a teenager, and I remember the state funeral. It probably shook her to pieces, but she pulled herself together by loving the Federation that much more. After all, if he wasn't around to be Admiral Janeway anymore, then she could be, couldn't she? And when we got stranded out here, she lost everything again, her home and her family and her fiancé, but there's Starfleet, and Starfleet principles. And she held on to them for dear life."

I turned my head to see him better; he was examining his hands in the bright light, nervously clenching his fist. "She was faced with a dilemma, though, because her crew was hardly a Starfleet crew. How do you hold together a ship full of renegades and rebels? I'll never know how she managed it, but she put them in uniforms and made them love her so much they didn't mind. And then – the Maquis leader. He wasn't willing to fit so neatly into the Starfleet mold, and he fought her every step of the way, even as he saluted her as his captain.

"The first time he beamed onto the bridge, Bea, the tension between them was palpable. They were enemies, yes, bound by a common catastrophe, but they expected that. But they respected each other from that first moment. And, I don't know, maybe this is inappropriate, but I'd gotten to know Chakotay a little when I was with the Maquis, and I could see the surprise, the attraction he felt when he met the captain sent to bring him in. She was tiny, beautiful, full of fire. He suppressed it, but for just a second it flickered in his eyes.

"And Kathryn needed a friend. She couldn't bear all those principles without someone to back her up, hold her up, hear her fears. And – he was there. He saw her as close to unguarded as she gets, and I think he loved her for it. That wasn't much of a secret, but none of us realized how far it went; he saw her strength and her weakness, and he loved them. It wasn't too long before he stopped fighting."

"But why didn't he _tell_ her?"

"Because there were rules, Beatrice. 'The captain of a vessel in deep space shall not under any circumstances pursue a romantic or sexual relationship with a subordinate officer,'" he quoted in his best stuffy admiral voice. "Starfleet had already thought of all that, and remember, your mother lived by Starfleet. Even if he told her, she never could have reciprocated. And I think that even though the words may never have been said, that her trust and friendship gave way, and she barely noticed when she started loving him back."

"Tom." I shrugged his arm from my shoulder, and twisted around to face him. "Come on. This is like – like the novels we burn for fuel. They love each other and never say a _word_?"

"It's crazy, right? Except, what else could they do? As the only Starfleet captain in the Delta Quadrant, your mother clings all the more fiercely to each and every rule. And more than that, being in love makes you weak and stupid and open to pain, and those are all things captains can't afford to be. She probably kept him at arm's length, ended every revelatory conversation before it began, and pinned her pips on straight every morning."

"But couldn't she just – "

"No, she couldn't. Not Kathryn. Think about it: Starfleet principles have held her together her whole life. What happens if she gives them up for him?"

I slipped the blanket around my shoulders as I thought. "Well, if loving him isn't enough, she might fall apart." I folded my arms. "Starfleet captains don't fall apart either, do they?"

"Nope." He offered me a rueful smile. "That's the thing that scares her the most. She kept an iron grip on her principles, even if it broke her heart, because it kept her from losing control. To admit that she was human enough, ordinary enough to love someone – well, I think she was afraid that it would make her too human to be the kind of captain that her ship needed."

"And she never told anyone else for the same reason. But – Tom, I'm not a little kid. She must have told him sometime, or I wouldn't be here."

He laughed out loud, and pulled me up against him in a crushing hug. "You don't miss a thing. You really are just like Kathryn." He ran his fingers through his hair, which was longer and shaggier than Starfleet would have allowed. "I've been thinking about that, and my best guess is that the night before we turned on the drive, she invited him to dinner. She expected to be home the next day, to have her family and friends and support again, and to not need her rules so badly to survive. I think – I think she broke them early."

"She told him?"

"That's for her to say. Something happened that night, though, and you were the result. She was tense and excited on the bridge that morning, but we never would have guessed it was anything more than the prospect of Earth. And then… everything fell apart around them."

"The crash."

"Yeah." He bit his lip and let out a heavy breath. "I was the first one conscious on the bridge, and when she woke up his name was the first thing she said. 'Chakotay,' she said, and then she turned to me and told me to raise him, but the power grid was already down and the comm. relays were crushed. She had gambled, admitted the truth, and she lost." He shook his head, his eyes wide. "She was alone. And worse, she needed to be captain more than ever."

That I understood; I'd seen firsthand the duty she believed she had to her crew. "So she kept it to herself. She never told anyone."

"No, she never did. God, imagine it! There she is, laying out a hundred of her crewmen, and there's one loss she feels more sharply than all the rest. But she couldn't mourn him! She couldn't scream and tear her hair out and sob the way I would if I lost B'Elanna. The few survivors were dying, Naomi lost her mother, we lost Neelix, we lost everyone. She couldn't stop pushing us forward, carrying us through our fear and bullying us through our grief. That was her job, and she wanted to do it." He dropped his face into his hands. "She's the best captain I've every served with, because she wants to support and protect her crew far beyond what Starfleet demands."

I nodded slowly; that was the mother I knew. "And then me."

"Oh, Bea, then you." He raised his head again, and his blue eyes were crinkled in a sad smile. "When she called me in for that physical, I couldn't believe it. Your mother had dodged every appointment with the doctor she'd ever had. I only got a few minutes of tricorder readings, since we hadn't figured out how to charge anything yet, but when I read her elevated hormone levels and turned the scanner towards her abdomen – I thought she was going to hit me." I laughed, and he stared at me in mock disbelief. "Words I never thought I'd say. 'Captain, you're pregnant.'"

"Did she hit you?" I asked, unable to keep the amusement from my voice.

"No. She took it very calmly, just said, 'That changes things, doesn't it?' But it didn't change anything. She stayed the captain as best she could, and we let her, because she needed it so badly. Except – we knew, Bea. We knew that she had lost someone who she trusted that much."

"And you didn't guess who."

"Seems silly, but we just couldn't imagine her like that with anyone; she'd played the role of stern captain too well. And she was so determined, Bea; she didn't know who else to be. So we never forced her hand and – well, we didn't guess because we didn't try. We welcomed you without questions. "

I shook my head. "Didn't you wonder?"

"Of course. But if it was my curiosity or Kathryn's well-being – I don't know, Bea, it seemed better not to intrude. And how do you ask her a question she doesn't want to answer? I've never known, and it's been twenty years." He looked at me over his steepled fingers. "We should have seen it, though. His coloring, his smile… you never see what's staring you in the face."

We sat still for a minute, the cold metal of the cargo containers against our backs. Tom was shivering, but I wasn't ready to go back yet. Finally, I asked very softly, "Does he realize, Tom?"

"Chakotay? He must." He turned to face me, and reached out to tuck a curl behind my ear. "He's been reliving that night, and the nightmare that followed, for fifteen years, and you were the one thing he never thought to hope for. But you – you're every inch Kathryn's daughter, and what's more, his. He must realize, Bea."

I couldn't reconcile the defeat in his voice with his words. He finally had an answer to the question that I had only asked once; I had a father, and he was alive. What was there to be sad about? But then, a dead and icy _Voyager_ was all I'd ever known, and I couldn't understand the burden of fifteen years wasted time, of what might have been if not for one miscalculation, of what could have happened if my mother hadn't kept her secrets so well.


	7. Warmth

**Winter's Child, continued.

* * *

**

Tom let me sit in silence for several minutes more, but when he saw the way I was shivering and felt my icy hands he stood me up. "Enough," he said, breathing warm air on my fingers before pulling me to my feet. We slid out into the corridor, I trailing the heavy blanket behind me, and Tom led the way back towards the bridge. We had hardly rounded the next bend when we came face to face with my mother.

She was anxious; her hands were twisting together, and she was walking slowly through the plants, her lips pressed tight. In the crook of her arm she carried my coat, so she had been looking for me. I stopped dead, and Tom let his hand fall from my shoulder. "Kathryn," he said softly, nodding at her, and squeezed past both of us. He left us there, face to face in the silent corridor, and she didn't speak until his footsteps had faded in the distance.

"Beatrice," she said, and fumbled with the coat. I dropped the blanket and let her help me into it; it was cold. She fished in her pocket and brought out a scarf, which she wrapped around my head, knotting it beneath my chin with fumbling fingers. "Beatrice, I'm sorry."

I bent down to pick up the blanket. "I know." Together, we folded it in half, and she tentatively draped it across her shoulders, holding out the other end for me. I slipped in beside her, and she wrapped a thin, wiry arm around my waist.

"The thing is – and this isn't an excuse, but – " She took a deep, shuddering breath. "Your father," and her voice caught on the word, "and I never had the chance to – to talk about what happened between us. I didn't know how to tell you about him, to tell you what he meant to me, and to tell the truth about what it was like for us on _Voyager_. I didn't want to lie to you, to pretend that your father and I had what Tom and B'Elanna have, so I – "

"Left him out," I said. We began to walk back toward the bridge, the long way. "It would've been hard, explaining love and Starfleet to a little kid."

"Starfleet?" She said, her voice less tentative. "What did Tom say? Actually," she added, and I was reassured to hear the hint of a chuckle in her voice, "I don't want to know." She reached out to pluck a leaf from one of the bean plants as we passed. "I suppose he's right," she said, and she crushed the leaf between her fingers. "Starfleet did have a lot to do with it."

I snaked my arm around her waist, too. "I'm sorry I ran away," I said, feeling very foolish as I did. "I just didn't know what else to do."

"Oh, Bea, I know why you did. You're so grown up all the time that I forget that you're only fourteen." She sighed. "It was a lot to ask, that you sit there with the father you'd never been told about while your mother had a temper tantrum."

We walked on in silence for a few moments. I marveled that my mother had been forced to confront her deepest secret and could describe it as a 'tantrum;' that wasn't what I would have said, at all. But I felt her arm shaking against me, and I knew she wasn't as calm as she pretended. As we neared the edge of the garden, I finally asked, "Mama, did you… did you tell him?"

She drew in a quick breath, but before she could answer, another voice said, "No." We both jumped, and turned to look down the corridor ahead of us. Beyond the last plants, the modified lighting ended, and the corridor was as dim as all the ones below decks; Chakotay stood about ten meters away, fading into the frosty darkness in his environmental suit. We just stared at him.

"I came to find you," he said unnecessarily, and my mother dropped her end of the blanket and began to pace back and forth in the narrow space between the cargo containers. Chakotay watched her for a moment, then said, "This is quite impressive. I take it this is how you kept everyone fed?" He was so still, his expression so controlled. He was waiting.

"Yes," I said after a pause. Were we really going to chat about the garden? "We adjusted the lights to produce the full spectrum, and there's a bicycle dynamo in one of the junctions we use to keep them charged." I turned back toward my mother, pulling at the trailing end of the blanket; she was coiled so tightly. Had she imagined this conversation, rehearsed it in the lonely hours running the dynamo, whispered it to the dead? Or had it seemed too absurd?

If she had, I was sure she had never imagined him talking about agriculture while she wore a hole in the floor. "How do you deal with mineral depletion in the soil?"

"Um." I looked over at him, but he was still watching her. I didn't know what to do except answer. "The glacial water has a low concentration of most vital ionic and mineral compounds, so we filter for that, and Eddie designed a waste processor to replenish the organic and nitrogenous material the plants need."

"Interesting." It wasn't really, but he cast around for another question. "And how – "

"Chakotay," she interrupted, "this is ridiculous." I was relieved to hear her no-nonsense tone; the world was upside down, but she was still my mother. "You both know the truth. You don't care about the garden, Chakotay, and Bea never really has either."

He let his arms drop to his sides. "Let me guess, Kathryn: she prefers quantum mechanics."

My mother blushed, but didn't rise to the bait. "Chakotay, this is Bea, Beatrice Teya Janeway."

He might have known, but he hadn't believed in until just then. All the tension let go: his face relaxed, his shoulders dropped, his hands unclenched. "Kathryn, I – "

"Before you apologize for anything, Chakotay," she said, taking another step forward and reaching up to his shoulder, "Stop. You couldn't have been here, and you never would have left me – and any –" she glanced at me, then continued, "any birth control was as much my responsibility as – and regardless," she pushed on, despite the hint of a smile on his face, "she has been a joy."

Still, he didn't say anything. My mother took a deep breath, and when she glanced at me I knew immediately that she wished she could say this to him privately. I cast my eyes to the floor. "I don't know what that last night meant to you, Chakotay," she said, so quietly I had to strain my ears, and she raised her hand to his cheek. "I've thought about it for the last fifteen years. It could have been hope, but just as easily, fear; were we finishing what began on New Earth, or continuing it, or was it something else entirely? Was it love, or was it sex? I couldn't know what it meant to you, and so I couldn't know what Bea would mean to you." She let her hand slip down to his chest, bracing herself. "To me, she was the – the proof, Chakotay, of all those years. The trials we endured, and all the trust we shared. And more, of course. A child is more than her mother understands her to be."

"And to you, Kathryn? What was that night to you?"

She exhaled, but before she could answer, the chirp of a communicator interrupted. He fumbled with it, revealing his agitation, and said a little breathlessly, "Yes?"

"_Dammit, Chakotay, what's going on down there? Have you found the Doctor and Seven of Nine?" _The voice was female and impatient.

"Tessa," he said, then stopped. His eyes traveled from my mother's face to the lush greenery around him, from the icicles on the ceiling to me. "It's a little more complicated than we anticipated. There are – "

"_Was the ship looted? I knew – "_

"No, nothing like that. There are survivors."

I could almost hear her breathing over the channel. When she spoke, her brash, smooth tone was gone. "_Who, Chakotay_?"

"About ten of the crew, and – and their children. Look, I can't – I'll talk to you soon, Tess. I don't know what we're going to do, yet. Chakotay out." He cut the signal, and looked up at my mother. "Tessa has been helping us find _Voyager_." My mother pursed her lips and waited. "This is a conversation we can have later, Kathryn. It's freezing down here."

"It is; I'm sorry," she said, sincerely, turning back toward the garden. "I'd forgotten that it could be anything else." He jogged to catch up with her. "But please understand: I've been raising a child on a dead ship for fifteen years, Chakotay. I don't have much patience with later. If you want to tell me that you're sleeping with her, or even in love with her, I won't be surprised."

"Kathryn, I – "

"It's in her voice," she said, still looking straight ahead, walking as fast as dignity and layers of skirts let her. "I spent too long loving you not to recognize it."

He stopped dead, and I almost ran into him. "Loving me?" He almost whispered it, and she slowed, as though suddenly realizing what she'd said. "Dammit, Kathryn. I wasn't supposed to say that out loud."

She turned. "Neither was I."

"This is going to sound so childish. Did you mean it?"

Hand on her hip, she let a crooked smile sneak across her face. "I thought that was obvious when I didn't let you leave that night."

"You said it yourself. It could have been fear or hope, sex or love. I didn't know then, but it seemed rude to ask for clarification when you'd finally invited me in. And if you hadn't meant it…"

"You didn't want to know." She spun on her heel and began to walk towards the bridge again, more slowly this time. "I meant it. But that was fifteen years ago, Chakotay, don't be afraid to tell me you've moved on."

"My heart is here," he called after her, and he sounded so tired. "Please, Kathryn."

She didn't stop, and I realized suddenly that she was afraid. If he didn't love her, if he were alive and didn't love her, then what she had held inside was just the fevered dream of a lonely, lovesick woman. But as he ran after her, I saw what she couldn't see: that he was afraid, too.

"Kathryn, please," he said again, "please. I died when I lost you." She stopped then, her back to him. "I thought you were gone, and my heart just stopped beating. It's been like - like living without my heart. My soul." Her shoulders sagged and she turned almost imperceptibly to listen. He pressed his advantage. "Tess – she thinks that – she thinks she knows me, but she doesn't realize how much I left here." He walked toward her, slowly, his eyes fixed on narrow crescent of her face that he could see. "I never could have - Kathryn, I thought I'd find your body frozen, untouched by the last fifteen years, and I just hoped that your death had been quick, that you were whole, that I could remember you as you were."

"Well, you can't do that," she said, wryly. She turned toward him, blue eyes bright. "I'm sadder, and older, and altogether more wrinkled."

He closed the distance between them, and with tender uncertainty laid his broad palm over her cheek. "I'm so glad," he whispered, his voice breaking, and impossibly slowly leaned forward to kiss her.

* * *

The icy corridors seemed entirely different, afterward. There was a working ship in orbit, and my mother was kissing my father in empty hallways. The universe seemed bigger, and our corner of it less harsh and isolated; I wondered whether Harry and Chakotay's ship had replicators, sonic showers, holodecks. More importantly, I hoped for windows: I'd heard a lot about stars.

I wondered, too, about Tessa. She would be the first person we'd ever met who had nothing to do with the Delta Quadrant; she'd never been in a single story. It occurred to me that there were a lot of people in the universe who'd never made it into the stories, whole worlds of them. What would they be like?

If I'd had to guess, I'd have said that my mother and Chakotay hadn't even noticed my absence yet, but I didn't mind. I may have been Chakotay's daughter, but my mother had been his lover first, and she was real to him. I pried the doors open and squeezed onto the bridge; the rest of the crew waited there. Harry's environmental suit and the blue shoulders of the Doctor's uniform stood out among the all the muted grey as they all turned in unison at the screech of the door.

"Bea, where's Kathryn?" Maddie asked, looking puzzled, and I caught Tom's wink over her head.

"With Chakotay," I said, glancing around at the assembled adults. Tuvok had raised his eyebrow, and the Doctor looked a little ruffled. "My – my parents," I said, trying out the unfamiliar phrase, "are in the garden, getting reacquainted."

A moment of absolute silence followed; it was Tom who first began to laugh. B'Elanna bit her lip, trying to suppress her smile, and Harry Kim stared at the two of them in shock. "You mean – "

"Weren't you paying attention, Harry?" B'Elanna said with a smirk. "Bea was conceived before the crash, remember?" Madelein and Joe had dissolved too, and Eddie was grinning.I knew them well enough to know that they weren't laughing out of malice or ridicule, but that they were so happy, so relieved: they had been rescued, and their captain had finally stopped punishing herself, even if just for the length of a kiss.

"But – not – " He looked helplessly around the bridge. I caught a glimpse of the man he might have been the last time he had stood here, the green, upstanding ensign from Tom's stories.

"Yes," Tom said, "and thank God. Though I hope," he added wickedly, throwing his arms around his wife's shoulders as she shook with silent laughter, "that they have the sense to keep their clothes on. It's cold down here."

* * *

_Note: I've given this crew an awfully hard time... I owed them at least one moment of bliss before the end._


	8. Rescue

**Winter's Child, continued.

* * *

**

The day I met my father was also the day I first felt the humming nothingness of the transporter, and ever spent more than a few minutes with my feet bare. It was the first time I left _Voyager_, the first time I had a replicated meal. My first glimpse of the way things should have been, and of how broken they were.

We sat crowded into the Flyer's crew compartment, children hugged against their parents, gasping as our fingers and toes thawed out. We shed layers and rehashed memories, and within half an hour I was wearing only a single tunic and had heard more about Tom and B'Elanna's courtship from Harry than they'd every let slip before.

Harry and Chakotay replicated a meal for everyone, a patchwork feast of their favorite dishes. The food was a revelation: the colors and the smells were nothing I had ever imagined, nor could have. A meal on frozen _Voyager_ was bland wheat bread, cold-hardy greens which never lost the taste of sour metal, root vegetables roasted, hot bitter tea. This, though, took my breath away – bright fruits and vegetables, cooked a dozen different ways and breads that melted and crumbled and crunched against our teeth. There was cheese and ice cream, things that we children had never encountered and didn't quite trust, and sweet desserts that weren't just fruit preserves. I laughed aloud when I bit into a square of fudge, the dark smooth taste of it, the way it gave way against my lips. How could you explain chocolate? The closest I'd ever come was what my mother called almost-gingerbread, which Joe'd perfected for birthdays.

And I wasn't the only one: Ada's calm was broken as she devoured a banana, and my mother nearly wept at the smell of her coffee. Joe and Eddie were showing little Harry how to roll rice in nori, and Maddie had her eyes closed, the peel of a blood orange held beneath her nose, the fruit itself forgotten on her lap. Harry Kim couldn't stop smiling, so different than the grim atoning man I'd met a few hours ago. And Chakotay – he sat on the floor by B'Elanna and Zayek, cradling Miral in the crook of his arm, leaning against my mother's knees on the bunk behind him. From where I sat, I could see the peace in his eyes as he smiled at the baby, the way he checked in with my mother every few minutes, and the way her hand rested on his shoulder. So even though Tessa stood awkwardly in the doorway, her eyes firmly on Chakotay, and even though we were as crowded as we'd ever been in the Jefferies tubes junctions, I imagined that it was like _Voyager_ again, whole and unfrozen.

Still, though, it was a fragile happiness. It was more like those long nights in the conference room – exchanging stories and memories, keeping the lost alive by reciting their lives one more time. We were all thinking about the hundred and more crewmen missing; in the silence following the slightly embroidered story of the crew's marooning on Hanon IV, my mother raised her hand in a toast, saying hoarsely, "To rescue, and to those for whom the rescue came too late."

Tessa slipped away then. Her expression was inscrutable, and after a few minutes I pushed myself to my feet and murmured something about finding the lavatory. My mother nodded distractedly, but no one paid me any mind as I picked my way around the cabin and slid into the corridor.

She was sitting in the pilot's seat, one hand idly splayed along the controllers. Her dark hair was pulled back, and I stood for a moment, studying her. Her clothes fit her so well, replicated for her rather than tacked together from salvaged uniforms and blankets, and in comparison to the gaunt, weakened adults I'd known even her narrow cheeks seemed full. I slid into other seat, thumping deliberately, and she spun in the chair, startled.

She narrowed her dark eyes at me. "What do you want?" she asked, after a long moment. Her voice was fragile, and in the dark cabin I wondered if there were tears in her eyes.

"Nothing," I said. I looked past her to the windows, the still stars hanging over the icy planet below. "It's just crowded in there."

"Right," she said as she leaned back into the chair. When we had all beamed up, crowding into the aft cabin, Tessa had shaken hands with my mother, her expression guarded, and then suggested that Harry and Chakotay get us all fed before we faded to nothing. She had seemed cheerful enough, but she'd also brushed off introductions, standing outside the crush. And now she looked at me steadily, stripped of that polite, so-glad-we-rescued-you veneer, and I had no idea what to say to her.

She spoke first, and she sounded resigned. "Which one are you?"

"Oh," I said. "Beatrice. Kathryn's daughter."

She closed her eyes. "Ah." She ran a hand over her hair, holding the back of her head for a moment before letting her arm fall to her side. "I've heard a lot about your mother."

"Me too," I said. "But you've probably heard more."

She laughed, eyes still closed. It was a hollow sound. "Wouldn't surprise me," she said. "Harry and Chakotay can't go a day without mentioning her. Mostly, it's Harry: he let her down, and he's never forgiven himself." She opened her eyes and stared out at the glacier below. "I couldn't understand it, at first. I never served in Starfleet, see, I'd never felt that loyalty for my first captain."

There was an ironic bite to her tone, and I had to ask, "Do you now?"

She threw me a sharp look, then exhaled noisily. "No. I don't. Chakotay – tried, he tried to explain it to me, but it didn't show me anything except that he felt the same way. He might not have talked about her, but she was his captain." Her lips twisted in a mirthless smile. "And when he did tell a story about her, she wasn't 'Captain Janeway' at all. She was 'Kathryn.'"

"They were good friends," I said, wondering if Chakotay had ever told her the whole truth. He had paused, when we had transported to the Flyer, taking both her hands and whispering into her ear, but I doubted that much had been said in those few seconds.

She didn't respond to that. "Kathryn, beating them all at pool; Kathryn, bargaining with the Borg; Kathryn, planting tomatoes with bits of garden in her hair." She shook her head. "But he never said she had a child; he only ever mentioned babysitting the little Ktarian girl. But you look old enough to have been around fifteen years ago, just barely."

"No," I said, cautiously. "I was born after the crash."

"Just after, then." Tessa sighed, and twisted the chair to face me again. "There was a lot he never mentioned, though. I had to press him to get stories about Janeway, and if I tried to ask about the other Maquis, it always turned into some story about uniting the crews. Which was really a story about her." She glanced at the door; a swell of laughter drifted through from the aft cabin. "Good friends, huh? Did she talk about him down there?"

"No," I said truthfully. "I never realized how important he was to her, until today." Tessa met my eyes, and I realized instantly it had been the wrong thing to say. "I'm sorry, I meant – "

"Exactly that." She wiped her eyes with back of her hand, almost angrily. "Isn't this terrible? You're _alive_, and I just keep wishing that we'd found what we'd expected and we could go ahead with things as planned. I'm no good at this," she gestured toward the door, "and I don't belong here."

There was nothing I could say to that. I was sure she had seen the way my mother let her hand fall against Chakotay's shoulder, and I couldn't deny that no one had invited Tessa into the party. We lapsed into a silence; I stared out the window, trying to count the stars, and Tessa stared at me, almost without seeing.

"Beatrice," she said, finally, and I got the feeling that she was forcing herself to get the words out, "did your father survive the crash, too?"

I opened my mouth, but said nothing. From the way her eyes were fixed on my face, I knew that she had seen in me what I had finally glimpsed in Chakotay, just a short hour ago; this was a last and desperate hope. "He – " I began, but I found that I couldn't tell her. "My mother never talked about him," I finished. It wasn't quite a lie.

"Until today," she said, softly, and I knew that she understood.

I echoed, "Until today."

"Oh, God." She leaned forward, bracing her elbows on her knees, cradling her head in her hands. Minutes passed before she spoke again. "I knew," she finally said, not to me at all, "I knew that he'd lost his best friends, his family, here, but I never thought that he meant it literally. It was like I was – oh, I don't know, his salvation." He shoulders shook, but I couldn't tell if she were laughing or crying. "Do you know what it's like, to love a man like him? I had the chance to be his family, to be his everything, and I only had to share him with the dead."

She flinched as another burst of laughter filtered into the dark cabin. "I knew, Beatrice," she said, and she looked up at me, her hands still framing her face, "that as long as he loved me, it didn't really matter that he loved them too, and I told him never to lie to me about that. I thought he hadn't." She bit at the inside of her lip. "But he never told me that he and – he never said he was expecting a child."

"He never knew," I broke in, alarmed by the defeated fury in her eyes. "He didn't lie to you."

"No?" Her voice dropped to a murmur, and it was as though she was fighting to keep her control. "Tell me, how does a man conceive a child aboard a Starfleet ship without meaning to? How, exactly, in the age of standard contraceptive boosters and stupid intimacy protocols, does that happen?"

"I don't – " There was no good answer, and though I didn't doubt the spontaneity of my conception, she made a good point. Lapsed immunizations on a Starfleet ship were rare. "It was – " But I bit my tongue before I finished; 'an accident' wasn't quite right, because I may have been, but I was pretty sure that there had been nothing accidental between my mother and Chakotay that night.

She crossed her arms over her chest, and shook her head, looking away. "It doesn't matter," she said, blinking rapidly. "Whether he – it doesn't matter. There's no part of him that's mine anymore."

"I should go," I said. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to – " I stopped. She was right: it didn't matter what Chakotay had known and what he had chosen to tell her about his captain, because Tessa had lost him as soon as he heard my mother's voice. "I'm sorry," I repeated, sincerely.

A beeping from the communications console interrupted my retreat; we both stared at it for a long moment. Tessa pushed herself to her feet, leaning over the panel, and with a last swipe at her eyes brushed past me and sprinted up the steps to the door.

"Chakotay!" she called, and she was all business, with no hint of the overlooked lover in her voice. "They've found us."

* * *

"Let me get this straight," my mother said, a hand on one hip, standing at the rear of the fore cabin. "You two – you _three_ – stole the Delta Flyer and are wanted for treason, and we are being hailed by a Galaxy-class starship sent to bring you in."

Chakotay cocked an eyebrow, but he didn't seem to have an answer. Harry Kim, though, met her eyes; he seemed almost proud. "And stole a Borg temporal transceiver, yes," he said. She tilted her head, waiting. With an impatient sigh, he added, "It's high treason, actually. I think the conspiracy to violate the temporal prime directive got us promoted." The proximity alert beeped again. "Captain, we did what was necessary, and we'll face the music."

She laughed, mirthlessly. "Necessary," she repeated, "and apparently highly illegal." She glanced around the cabin, from Tessa to the survivors crowded in the doorway. Her gaze lingered on Chakotay before she turned back to her grim ensign. "Well, then. Not exactly the greeting I expected from the Federation, but... we have to talk to them, don't we?" She slipped into the copilot's seat. "I'll try not to extend your sentence," she murmured, and swiftly tapped a command. Standing directly behind her, I caught her eye in the darkened screen before the other ship responded. A smile flitted across her face, as though we were sharing a private joke, and then faded into a stern neutrality.

"This is Captain LaForge of the – " The pale prosthetic eyes of the hailing captain widened, but he pushed on. "The Starship _Challenger_. I was going to say that I was surprised that you hadn't left orbit, but – well, you aren't the rebels I was expecting."

"Captain LaForge," my mother said smoothly. "Kathryn Janeway of the Starship _Voyager_. Or what's left of her." I wasn't sure if she meant _Voyager _or herself. She raised her chin, and let the brassy diplomacy drop a little. "You aren't the inexperienced hothead I was expecting, either."

LaForge smiled, almost doubtfully. "Captain Janeway."

"Am I still a captain?" She asked the question easily enough, but her hand strayed to the collar of the tattered grey tunic she wore, and LaForge caught the motion. In the pause that followed, I was sure that he took in her cobbled-together clothes and roughened skin, the grey streaks in her hair, the lines around her eyes from worrying through too many cold nights.

"Yes," he said, quietly, "yes, Captain, I think you are." He exhaled forcefully and leaned in toward the screen. "You understand that I need to take Tessa Omond, Harry Kim and Chakotay into custody."

"As I understand, Captain, you're here to prevent them using a rather ingenious but farfetched plan to change history." She too leaned toward the transmitter, and said, almost conspiratorially, "I think their plans have changed."

"Regardless," LaForge said, and there was a note of genuine regret in his voice.

Chakotay stepped down into the transmitter's sight, Miral still nestled in his arms. "Captain, we're prepared for the consequences of our actions, but we ask that the crew of _Voyager_ not be punished for them." He paused, and glanced around the crowded cabin. "Let them return home. The living and the dead."

My mother straightened, and spoke before LaForge could respond. "Please, give us a little time."

"The _Challenger_ isn't equipped for the kind of recovery operation you want, Chakotay," he said, slowly, distracted by the baby's murmuring, "but I'll back the request for a salvage mission once we get back to Earth. Starfleet might not consider it a priority, but - " He turned his ghostly eyes unflinchingly to my mother's, but it was he who looked away first. "I can give you thirty minutes," he said. "If we detect any transporter or engine activity during that time, we will open fire."

"Understood," my mother said, and her voice caught. "Thank you, Captain."

LaForge nodded, and raised his hand to cut off the signal; before he did, he cleared his throat. "Welcome back," he said, sadly, almost gently, and then the screen went dead.

* * *

Thirty minutes. Enough time for Ada to grow impatient with her lessons, or for a half-charged gel pack to go cold; twenty minutes longer than it took to circle deck one, and ten minutes longer than it had taken me to see myself in Chakotay. But not nearly long enough to understand our changed world.

I stared at the Federation seal on the blank screen, aware of the adults pushing into the cabin behind me. I heard B'Elanna shifting and Maddie's shuddering sigh, and noted the stiffness in my mother's shoulders and the way she flinched away from Chakotay's touch. This was all wrong: Starfleet had come, but not to save her or her crew. Instead, they were arresting her officers and tearing her from her lonely vigil.

"Kathryn," Chakotay said, hesitantly, "we always knew there was this risk. We'll have to return to Earth to stand trial, but I'm sure – with your testimony and our sincere apologies – that the charges – "

"Will be dropped," she said, and though she turned toward us she met no one's eyes. I saw it in her face: she was less preoccupied by their imprisonment than by her responsibility. Against every instinct, every unwritten rule, she was preparing to abandon her ship.

"Come on, Kathryn," Tom said, bracingly. One of the blinking lights on the console behind him lit up the hollows of his cheeks, and he took a step toward her, naked compassion in his eyes. He knew what was torturing her; I suspected all the survivors did, but none of us were willing to trespass. "There are plans to be made."

"Yes, of course," she said, and pulled herself up. Her smile was empty, but she headed toward the door, saying, "They probably won't let me speak to any of you before the tribunal, so perhaps we should discuss it now. Harry, Chakotay – " Chakotay looked after her as she moved through the room, surrounded and supported by her crew.

I gave him a rueful smile, and held my arms out for the baby. "Go on," I said. "She needs you there."

He met my smile with his own; it was like looking into a mirror. "Bea," he said, brushing his hand against my shoulder as I shifted Miral's weight in my arms, "I don't know you yet. But I think I'm going to be very proud to be your father."

Zayek, leaning up against the tactical console, favored me with a rare smile, no more than a twitch of his lips. Neither of us moved as the adults filtered from the room; little Harry slipped into the pilot's seat, carefully tracing the controls without pressing anything. Greg whispered in Ada's ear as he too left, and without a word she elbowed her way into the chair with Harry. We may have been privy to every meeting on _Voyager_, but things were different on a living ship: those decisions weren't ours to make or even witness any more.

Standing on the step, Miral's fingers grasping at my hair, I looked out over the glistening planet below. I tried to make out the curves and colors of _Voyager_, but she was invisible beneath the milky ice. I couldn't imagine what it was like down there now. In a few days, when the lights ran down, the garden would freeze and life support would fail. The conference room, the Jefferies tubes, my corner behind ops – they would be just like the icy corridors below, edged in frost, and _Voyager _would be left without a single soul to keep her warm.

It was almost intolerable: the ship had been my first friend, her stories the first I learned. Alone, obscured, a mausoleum for her crew – it wasn't an end that a ship like that deserved.


	9. Farewells

**Winter's Child, continued.

* * *

**

Captain LaForge waited almost forty-five minutes before he hailed again. Harry, Tessa, and Chakotay had by that time explained their plans in full to my mother and the other adults, but once that was done we lapsed into listless waiting. B'Elanna took back her daughter and sat cross-legged on one of the bunks in the crew cabin to nurse; promising a game, Zayek took little Harry and Ada below to the lab. My mother and Chakotay retreated to the cockpit, his hand hovering over the small of her back, and with tacit approval the rest of us settled ourselves on the bunks and against the walls.

It may seem strange, but no one said a word. We all had a thousand questions, and just as many speculations, but there would be time enough for all our hopes and worries later. When my mother returned to the room, she stepped into a taut silence; Juliet and Eddie scrambled to their feet, and Tuvok straightened his shoulders.

She cleared her throat. "The _Challenger_ is standing by to beam us to their transporter room," she said, and from the way her voice grated I guessed that she and Chakotay had sat in silence, too. "When we're ready."

Tom helped his wife to her feet and called down the corridor for the other children. "I'd say we're ready now," he said.

She looked from one face to the next, searching for something; she finally nodded, and pressed a panel on the console by the door. "Delta Flyer to _Challenger_."

"Challenger _here_. _Now, Captain?"_

"Yes." She took a deep breath, and said, "Eighteen to beam up."

Fifteen years studying _Voyager_ had taught me about the nuts and bolts of starship construction. I knew the wiring plan for the EPS relays, what a deflector dish was made of, and how to follow a warp core schematic scratched in frost on the floor. I had touched the delicate tendrils of the oxygen filtration villi, and I knew what happened when a bioneural gel pack burst. I could probably have navigated the Jefferies tubes of the _Challenger_ better than her crew, but still: nothing prepared me for a living ship.

_Challenger_ shone. The bulkheads were a matte white-grey, the carpets darker but spotless; schematics lit in brilliant colors flashed from every panel. There were indicators and monitors and flashes I couldn't even guess at. Everything made noise; consoles beeped and hummed, and I could hear the subtle pulse of the power grid in every wall. Every door opened before we got there, and the corridors were empty except for bustling crewmen.

The crew shone, too. Uniforms black and grey and immaculately pressed, their boots clacking on the deck, their faces scrubbed. I had never seen men and women so _neat_; not a hair was out of place. Standing by the ensign assigned to show my mother and me to our quarters, I could feel the dirt on my face and the wisps of hair pulling out of my braid, and it was a relief when the door slid shut behind us and we were left alone.

It was the first chance I'd had to catch my breath since we'd arrived. LaForge had met us himself, in one smooth motion welcoming the survivors back to the Federation and sending our rescuers to the brig. Harry and Tessa stepped forward immediately with a quick glance at my mother, but Chakotay had twined his fingers with her own and raised her hand to his lips before surrendering to the grim lieutenant by the door. I caught the flicker that passed through the small fleet of ensigns that stood by, but LaForge didn't say a word, just asked if we would rather go to sickbay or guest quarters.

In the spacious guest suite, my mother wasted no time in stripping off her tunic, skirt, and trousers, dropping them untidily on the floor by the bathroom before going, nude and barefoot, to turn on the sonic shower. We had no secrets from each other; we had shared a tiny sleeping space for fourteen years, and shared a rare bath in a cargo container full of scalding water more than once. Modesty was a luxury we had never had, and I could hear her sigh as the shower lifted years of grime away.

I slid my shoes off and padded to the window. The planet still turned below; at my mother's request, the _Challenger_ was staying in orbit until we had a chance to pay our last respects. I ignored the marvels around me – the replicator, the desk terminal, even the running water and soft beds. I knew what they were for, but I had no idea what I would do with them.

My mother found me like that ten minutes later. Still bone dry but wrapped in a towel, she was cleaner than I had every seen her, her skin restored to a delicate cream, the grey shining silver in her loose hair. "Go on," she said, "Get yourself clean and I'll replicate you something to wear."

I hesitated in the door of the bathroom, fumbling with the ties of my skirt. "I don't – " I started, but I wasn't sure how to finish. I felt unsteady, foolish; I didn't even know how to take a shower.

She smiled, almost sadly. "Just tell the computer to begin sonic shower sequence."

When I left the bathroom, covered in a bright white towel and still buzzing with the sound waves, the woman who greeted me was my mother as I'd never seen her before. The narrow lines of her body were defined by slim grey slacks and a tailored white tunic; her hair was pinned at the base of her neck, and though her feet were bare she carried a pair of shining boots in one hand. The only familiar thing was her commbadge, the same battered and bent insignia that she had worn every day since the crash: it shone on the creamy wool.

She was talking to the captain over an open channel; I heard him say, "_We're placing the Delta Flyer under armed guard in the shuttle bay until we find it. Are you sure they didn't bring it to the ship and hide the device somewhere_?"

"Quite sure," she said, raising her eyebrows at me in an expression of incredulous impatience. "I assure you, Captain, neither Harry nor Chakotay showed me the transceiver, or crawled into the warp manifolds to hide it. We spent the whole time on the bridge and in the conference room, and they were never alone there."

"_I'll take you at your word, Captain. LaForge out."_

She sat on the couch to pull on her boots, and handed me a neatly folded pile of clothes. "They can't find the temporal transceiver," she said, gesturing at the communication panel dismissively. I didn't reply, too busy examining the garments she had replicated for me. Getting dressed had always been a hassle before, layering leggings and trousers under heavy skirts, coats and cloaks. I had left eleven pieces of outer clothing in the Delta Flyer, not counting my gloves, socks, and the scarf that covered my head. This, though, was easy: over underclothes that fit perflectly, I slid on the pale green tunic, fastening the buttons along my shoulder, and stepped into the charcoal trousers.

My mother looked me up and down, reaching out to tug the tunic into place. I felt exposed in the form-fitting clothes, and I smoothed the fabric over my belly and squared my shoulders, posing for her. "Do I look okay?"

I expected her to laugh, but she just pulled me to sit beside her, and said in a muted tone, "You're lovely, Bea." A pause, a sigh. "It's even easier to see your father in you now." She combed through my hair with her fingers before reaching out for the brush. "But do you _ever_ brush your hair?"

"Sometimes." I closed my eyes; except that it was so warm, we might have been curled up in the Jefferies tube, my mother braiding my hair before bed as she had my whole life. Comforted, I asked a question that had been nagging at me. "Mama, why did they need to come here to use the transceiver?" They already had it, and it didn't matter where the correction was sent from. "Was it just to say goodbye?"

"I think that was part of it, but no." She sighed again. "It was really clever, actually. They were going to send the right phase correction directly to Seven of Nine, and they stole the temporal transceiver to do it. But they didn't know when we crashed, and without knowing that the correction wasn't much good." With nimble fingers she began an intricate plait. "So they thought – and quite rightly – that they could use Seven of Nine's implants to determine her time of death, and thus, the moment of the crash."

"Because she died on impact."

"Because they thought we _all_ died on impact." She tapped my shoulder, and I handed her the sparkling silver band to finish the braid; it seemed that even hair elastics on a living ship shone. "Of course, she did. It would have worked."

"But they could have figured it out the way Beth did," I said, turning to her and pulling my legs up on the couch. "By using the last sensor data to pinpoint the moment of the crash and the probable location."

"Yes, but that took Beth years, and with a working computer core would still have taken days, maybe even weeks." She smiled grimly, and pushed herself to her feet. I still wasn't used to her tiny, uninsulated silhouette. "They expected to be on the run, remember. Now come on," she added, throwing a pair of socks at me.

"Where are we going?" I asked, pulling them on. I couldn't even guess what other surprises the day would hold. "Sickbay? Like Captain LaForge said?" I thought, then ventured, "The holodeck? Someplace new?"

"Oh, no," she said, softly. The replicator shimmered, and the woven polymer of an environmental suit like that Chakotay and Harry had worn appeared. "No, Bea. We need to go and say goodbye."

* * *

Out of respect or curiosity, and probably to scan surreptitiously for the missing transceiver, some of the _Challenger_'s senior officers joined us on the transporter pad. Six at a time, we were beamed onto the bridge, and though they gasped at the cold, the darkness, and the wreckage, I felt relieved. It had only been a few hours, so I shouldn't have been surprised that nothing had changed, but I was, and seeing my book abandoned on the floor behind ops and Maddie's latest construction project scattered across the lower deck reassured me.

Though I unfastened the jacket and pushed back the clunky hood, LaForge shivered even the through the heavy polymer suit. He stood back at watched as the children ran from room to room and the adults disappeared into the Jefferies tubes. His first officer, though, a lanky Bajoran with bright eyes, ran her gloved hands over the dead panels and examined each dark console.

"Unbelievable," she murmured.

"Commander Luta?" LaForge asked, gently, as she slid tentatively into conn and stared into the dead viewscreen.

"It's just – I read about _Voyager_, at the academy, Captain. My senior year, shortly after the Delta Flyer returned, the Dominion War had heightened everyone's interest in the Maquis and potential reconciliation. One of my senior projects was designing a training simulation based on the integration of the crews."

"Interesting," the captain said, moving over to stand behind her.

"It's what brought me into the diplomatic corps," she said, glancing around the dark bridge. "What I would give to have spoken to any of those Maquis, especially the Bajorans – how did Janeway manage it? Making them loyal to Starfleet, after everything that had happened to them?"

LaForge glanced around the empty bridge. "You could ask Janeway, Dhen," he said.

She spun, taking in the whole room at once. "I don't think so," she said, fixing her eyes on the command chairs. "The captain who did that – I think she died here." She stood up with a sigh. "If anyone was born to be a captain, it was her."

"You studied her at the academy, too?"

Luta Dhen laughed, a wry snort through her nose. "I was taking a class taught by Paris when she was presumed dead after being lost in the slipstream. He made her required reading." She saw me standing by the door, but turned back to her captain and said, softly, "A leader like her – her ship dies, her crew dies. How can she not go with them? Even if she keeps living."

LaForge twisted his lips. "I don't know," he said, softly. "She's a remarkable woman, and unless I miss my guess, she's still _Voyager_'s captain." He led her toward the conference room, prying open the reluctant doors, and as he slipped between them he said, "I'm not sure she can be anything else. Maybe that's the real loss."

The ready room, the conference room, the garden, the bridge: we passed through each room we had lived in. I committed it to memory, and from time to time my mother tucked something in her pocket – photos of lost friends, gifts given her, her pips. We had already decided not to take much, but I couldn't resist taking Beth's handwritten logs or the baby blanket Naomi had stitched for me from the scraps of her own.

Saying goodbye below deck one, though, was harder: with the exception of Beth, we had never known any of these people personally. It was hard to say goodbye to people who had only ever been stories to us. I lead Harry, Ada, and Zayek away from the stiff Starfleet officers, shocked into silence by the dead, and we walked slowly around the deck. When we reached an access tube, Ada slid her gloved hand into mine and tried to tug me towards it.

"Let's go home," she said.

"We'll go back to the _Challenger_ soon," I said, pulling her along. "Just a few more minutes."

She looked up at me with somber brown eyes. Her even tone breaking, she said, "But when are we going _home_?"

Puzzled, I said, "We're going to Earth, Ada, we'll get there in a few days, and then – "

"Not Earth," Harry said, looking from Ada's increasing frustration to me. "Home, Bea. She wants to know when we're going home."

Over his coppery head, Zayek met my eyes but said nothing: as the eldest and captain's daughter, it was my responsibility to explain. "You mean, upstairs. _Voyager_'s bridge." Of course. What else did home mean? It wasn't Earth, or Vulcan, or Betazed; those places, like the ship in orbit, had never been real to us before today. Home was a hollow, clanging ship where the power grid crackled during ice storms. Home was shivering and sleeping nestled against your parents with a gel pack at your back. Ada looked at me steadily. Home was bland wheat bread; what did chocolate mean to her?

"We're going to leave _Voyager_. We have to. We're going back to where our parents came from, where their families are."

She frowned, and gripped my hand tighter. "Will it be warm?" she asked. "Like on that ship?"

"Yes," I said. "It will."

She looked to Harry, who rubbed his ridges with the back of his hand before saying, "It's too warm there."

What could I say to that? I knew how my mother would have responded, and what any of the adults walking the halls expected me to say: you'll get used to it, and like it when you do. I should have told them that humans and Vulcans and Klingons were never meant to live in this kind of cold, said that we would all be happier and healthier. And yet, on the _Challenger_, I'd been aware of my bare head too, always waiting for the sting of the cold; I'd felt smothered and claustrophobic in the mild air.

So I told the truth. "Yeah," I said, turning back toward the corridor, her mittened hand in mine. "It is."

* * *

Even more strange than the _Challenger_'s clean, warm corridors were all the people. Nine decks among fifteen people is plenty, even when eight of them go unused, and Zayek and I had never had trouble finding a private corner for a conversation, or just to sharpen our rummy skills in preparation for the next bout with Tom. After we left orbit, though, we discovered that doing the same on this ship was going to be impossible: every room was occupied and the curious looks were more than enough to send us scurrying for the next nook.

Finally, we tried the one place more familiar to us than any other: the Jefferies tubes. Though the hallways and crew quarters were dramatically different than _Voyager_'s, there the absence of frost was the only difference, and we immediately felt at home. We crawled through the humming ship until we found an out-of-the-way junction far away from important system relays; we dangled our legs over the side of the chute and sat in silence for several minutes.

It was Zayek who spoke first. "How do you think Ada's grandparents will react to an adopted half-Vulcan child?"

She had been on my mind too. "How will they react to their sons' marriage?" Greg at least had left behind a wife and children, and I couldn't imagine that his sons would welcome a stepfather without some confusion or resentment. Would it be enough that he was alive, or would it still sting that he, like Tuvok, had broken faith? "What about you, Zayek? Will you stay with your mom or Tuvok?"

"I'm not certain. My father will likely wish to return to Vulcan, but…" Zayek trailed off. We rarely mentioned T'Pel and Tuvok's four elder children, the pon farr and the circumstances of Zayek's birth, but I could hear the worry in his voice. Those circumstances were about to confront all of us.

"I'm sure he'd like to take you there," I said. He said nothing, just swung his legs more forcefully. "But I'd like it if you stayed on Earth. Nearby."

"Will your mother return to Starfleet?" He sounded relieved at the change of subject.

"I don't know." I couldn't imagine that she would want to captain another ship, or sit behind a desk at Starfleet Headquarters, but all the same, it was at the center of her life: what else would she do? My mother as anyone other than Captain Janeway didn't make much sense to me. "She's never said – what she'd like to do if we get rescued. Not like everyone else."

We lapsed into silence again. All around us, relays clicked and hummed, sending power, oxygen, and information to every corner of the ship. I closed my eyes and imagined that we were back on _Voyager_; maybe deck twelve or thirteen, way down between the nacelles and the warp core where the power grid would have the most dense. I knew which crewmen belonged in the surrounding sections, and one by one I placed them. I was just moving to deck eleven when Zayek interrupted my mental shipbuilding.

"Is it really better this way, Bea?"

I was startled by the emotion in his voice: his deliberate Vulcan calm was gone, and he was the child I remembered him being on the coldest nights, in the worst ice storms. He sounded frightened and worried and very, very human. "What do you mean?"

His knuckles, clenched on the corner of the ledge, were white. "They could have reset the timeline, but they didn't. Harry, Chakotay and Tessa chose not to deliberately end the lives of their friends or erase their friends' children from history." He cleared his throat, his hand jammed in his pocket. "They abandoned their plans for us, Bea, but our – our homecoming hardly seems worth it."

I drew in a breath, but I couldn't argue; the frozen expressions of the crew haunted me, too. "It doesn't matter, anyway. The transceiver is gone."

In reply, he pulled his legs up and scooted away from the edge. I stared down at the bottom of the shaft, painting ice crystals on the walls. Behind me, he said, "Bea – " I spun around, and met Zayek's liquid eyes for a brief second before he dropped the compact grey device with a clatter on the decking.


	10. Catching Up

**Winter's Child, continued.

* * *

**

Twenty years is a long time to be away from the Federation, and fifteen an eternity to be without computers to someone born in the age of subspace data transfer. I wasn't surprised to find my mother perched behind the desk when I came back from the Jefferies tube, distractedly scanning newspapers and intelligence reports long since declassified. I leaned on the back of the chair and wrapped my arms around her shoulders.

She squeezed my arm but kept reading. Open on the terminal was a brief on the status of _Voyager_, written upon Harry and Chakotay's return; a précis of the Dominion War; a curt notice declaring _Voyager _and her crew lost; and the crew manifest of the _Challenger._ At the corner of the screen, several more documents blinked in the queue, downloaded but not accessed. "Where have you been?" she asked, tucking her chin against my forearm as she read.

"I got lost," I said. It wasn't true, but it seemed easier than explaining that Zayek and I had sat in a silent stalemate for the last forty-five minutes, staring at the transceiver, or that I had gone the wrong way from the Jefferies tube junction deliberately, to give myself more time to think. I let her go and straightened up. "What are you up to?"

She sighed and turned in the chair to face me. "Just trying to catch up on twenty years of Federation history, but I don't even know where to start. Captain LaForge kindly forwarded me the reports about _Voyager_, but there's so much more – we're going back to a very different Earth than the one we left."

I nodded. "Learn anything so far?"

"Chakotay and Harry got a parade, Starfleet is still recovering from a war fought with a species I've never heard of, and the Maquis were basically right about the Cardassians." She leaned back and closed her eyes. "It makes the Delta Quadrant sound almost friendly."

As she rubbed her temples, I slid down and knelt in front of her knees, chin level with the desk, squinting at the screen. It occurred to me as I began to read the précis that every book in the universe was now at my fingertips; the few I'd scavenged on _Voyager_ had hardly satisfied my curiosity. All those stories, the history Tom had taught, the poetry Juliet had hesitantly recited, the philosophy Tuvok hinted at – it was all there, waiting for me.

When the terminal beeped, I recoiled; my nose had been inches from the screen. In an instant, my mother leaned over me to tap at the panel, bringing up another program entirely. "It's a live transmission," she breathed; her fingers fumbled over the keys. "From Starfleet Command." I sat back on my heels and craned my neck to meet her eyes. She trailed her left hand across my back, settling it firmly on my shoulder, and with the lightest touch of her forefinger opened a channel.

The officer sitting behind the desk looked to me just like all the others in _Challenger_'s halls; he was older, but he was every bit as serious, his uniform just as precise. Only the expression on his face set him apart: in the instant of silence before he spoke, that crisp Starfleet calm seemed shaky.

"Captain Janeway," he said, then, with the barest hint of affection, "Katie." I looked up at my mother incredulously. No one had ever seemed less like a Katie than she did, and yet she must have been younger, softer once, and this man had known her then.

"Admiral Patterson," she said, smiling that crooked smile. "It's good to see a familiar face."

"LaForge has just submitted his report, and we wanted to contact you as soon as we could," he said, leaning forward on his elbows as he spoke. "I'm supposed to give you the official line, but I'm not going to tell you the protocol on missing ships. I'm sure you know it." He cleared his throat. "Instead, I'd like to apologize. We should never have stopped looking, Katie."

I felt her grip tighten on my shoulder. "From what I understand, Starfleet had other concerns."

"Don't let us off the hook. There's always a war or a diplomatic crisis to be dealt with; we still had a responsibility to our farthest-ranging vessel." He rubbed a hand over his bald head, glancing between me and my mother. "If I had realized, when I put your name forward for _Voyager_'s command, that I was sentencing you to – to – "

"To five years with a finer crew than any in the fleet," my mother broke in, her voice catching. "Don't misunderstand me, Admiral: it's been hell, and I wish that Starfleet had gotten their act together and come after us fifteen years ago. But I wouldn't give up this command if I could."

"Whatever mistakes we made here, Katie, at least your crew had you." He held her gaze for a long moment, then cleared his throat and glanced down at a data PADD he held. "I'm also supposed to inform you that your rescue is highly classified; Starfleet is worried about bad press, especially after the hullabaloo surrounding the end of the search nine years ago. They're not looking forward to announcing that in fact, _Voyager_'s beloved captain was alive all that time."

"So they're not even notifying our families?" My mother's tone was icy.

"They're not, Katie." The admiral lowered his voice, leaning still closer to the console. "But I am. I agree with you: after fifteen years slowly freezing to death in the Takara sector, your crew deserves more to be more than the 'Fleet's latest media gaffe."

My mother reached toward the screen, dropping her hand on the panel. "Thank you, Admiral. It means a lot to us."

"I wanted to double-check the identities of the survivors before I contacted any families. The only one LaForge could readily identify was you." He chuckled wryly. "It seems you made quite an impression on him. I'll be making the calls personally, though it's unlikely that I'll be able to arrange any two-way calls. If they would like to write notes, I would be happy to pass them along."

"Of course." My mother took a deep breath, drumming her fingers on the desk, before listing the survivors. She finished with, "And Naomi Wildman, Ensign Samantha Wildman's daughter. She was born in the Delta Quadrant, but you should be able to contact her father, a Ktarian man named Gresgrendrek."

The admiral noted the names on his PADD. "LaForge mentioned children; Naomi is clearly not the only one."

"No." My mother glanced down at me. "B'Elanna Torres and Tom Paris have two children, Harry and Miral; Zayek Swinn is Madelein's son, and Ada is being raised by Eddie Matteo and Greg Ayala."

"Tom Paris, a father?" A genuine smile flickered across the admiral's face. "Owen will be pleased. How old are the children?"

Pride crept into my mother's voice. "Harry is seven, and Miral is about nine weeks."

"I must say, Katie, when you decided to bring Paris aboard, I was skeptical, but by all reports he took advantage of that second chance. Owen almost couldn't believe the way Harry Kim described him at the debriefings." He put down the PADD. "I'm glad to hear it wasn't just the bias of a friend."

"Not at all, Admiral," my mother said. "I'm sure Tom earned every word of praise." There was a pause; I could almost see her eyes narrowing. "Speaking of the admiralty – any sense of the attitude toward my officers?"

"The conspirators, Katie?" Admiral Patterson looked uncomfortable. "Pity, mostly, some sympathy, but not a whole lot of forgiveness. There are a few hard-liners who aren't going to back down easily. After the war – the Dominion War – there are a great many with personal grievances against the Federation, and the security council is worried that if they're lenient with Kim and Chakotay it will weaken Starfleet's authority." When my mother didn't respond, he said bracingly, "I'm afraid that this is one case that won't be decided by public opinion, Katie."

"The honor of the Federation's at stake," she supplied sharply. Though I couldn't see her face, I could tell that she was staring him down from the way his eyes traveled the screen, avoiding her gaze.

"Yes." His eyes landed on me, and he grasped at the distraction. "But who is this? Naomi, or Ada – "

From the tartness of her voice, it was clear that she resented the change of topic, but she let it go. "This is my daughter, Beatrice." The edge softened, and she added, "I'm sure my family would like to hear about her, too."

The admiral cleared his throat again. "Actually, Katie, you can tell them yourself. When I said no two-way calls, I really meant, none that your sister hadn't already bullied me into arranging." He looked almost embarrassed. "That was the first call I made, and if anyone asks, I'll insist it was before Starfleet told me not to."

She had drawn a sharp breath when he mentioned her sister; now she let it out noisily. "Thank you," she almost whispered, the brash captain gone. "For letting her bully you, if nothing else."

"Phoebe Janeway is not a woman to be trifled with. Rather like her sister," Admiral Patterson said, his eyes crinkling. "Now, we'll speak again, Katie; your sister is waiting."

"Impatiently, I'm sure. Thank you, Admiral – for – " But he waved his hand dismissively, and tapped a sequence on the brightly lit panel. His office was replaced by another room, equally severe, and for a moment it seemed empty. "Phoebe?" my mother called out, tentatively.

The woman that rushed into the field of vision almost tripped as she slid into the chair. "Kathryn?" she whispered, then laughed out loud, with more nerves than mirth. "My God, Kathryn, you – do you have any idea how many times you've been declared dead?" She had the same arched cheekbones and bright eyes as my mother, but her hair was a glossy brown with only a few telltale white streaks, bobbed at her chin; she had that clean, full look that everyone on the _Challenger _shared. She didn't glance at me, and I guessed that her screen had a narrower field than the admiral's; she couldn't see me at all. "It really is you, isn't it?"

"Phoebe – "

"My heart skipped a beat when the dean called me out of my class this afternoon; I thought I was done with getting confidential calls from Starfleet, Kath! First, when you and dad – and then, when _Voyager_ disappeared, mom and I got that one together, and the news of those two officers in the shuttle." Her smile faltered, and she wiped impatiently at her eyes. She couldn't seem to stop talking. "It was almost a relief when they declared you lost, not to half-expect an admiral to wake me up every night."

"Phoebe, I – " My mother tried again to break in, but her sister nervously talked right over her.

"No, I'm sorry, Kathryn, I just don't know what to – "

My mother swallowed, hard, and said, "How have you been, Phoebe?"

Phoebe looked incredulous, "No, how are you? My life is mundane details, yours – "

"I would kill for mundane details," my mother said. She leaned forward, and Phoebe's eyes widened. "Please, just – tell me about the last twenty years. I need – " She broke off, her fingers pressing hard into my shoulder, her eyes fixed on her sister.

"Of course," Phoebe said softly. "Well, I'm teaching at a small art college outside Vancouver. About as different from Starfleet as I could find, and after all the nonsense about the recovery missions, it was a relief to be dealing with students, not cadets." She paused, thinking; how to sum up the last two decades? "Oh! I'm married, Kath. His name is Samuel Tayn."

"Samuel," my mother murmured.

"Sam. He's – oh, Kathryn, this is ridiculous. There's so much to tell you." Her hands twisted before her, a nervous gesture not unlike my mother's own. "I think you'll approve of him. We have a daughter, who we rather predictably named Kathryn; she was born just after you were declared dead."

"And mom?" My mother's voice was low, hollow.

"I forgot," Phoebe said, tears starting in her eyes again. "You couldn't know. She died, six years ago. Oh, Kath," she said, reaching out and laying her fingers against the screen. "I'm so sorry."

"I didn't expect the world to stop," my mother said, and I was surprised by how clear her voice was. "But I would have liked – well. I would have liked Beatrice to meet her." At Phoebe's quizzical look, her mournful calm was somewhat broken. "My daughter, Phoebe. The one sitting here with me."

Phoebe tapped her console with her free hand, presumably resetting the viewer angle; her eyes again widened as she took me in. She looked between us for a long moment, then said, in an inscrutable tone, "You still manage to surprise me, Kathryn. I thought I'd figured you out a long time ago."

"Really?" My mother's nervous hands ran over my hair. "Well, then you know me better than I do, because I still haven't." Between them hovered the unspoken question, but when Phoebe spoke next, she didn't ask it.

"What was it like, Kathryn?" Her voice was soft, tentative, but in her grey eyes I saw the worry and loneliness of a lifetime in the shadow of Starfleet Janeways, and a desperate need to know what her sister had suffered.

Behind me, my mother's whole body tensed; her muscles, like mine, remembered the icy air too well. "I tried so hard to keep the cold away." She let out a shuddering breath, warm against my neck, but I shivered. "There's nothing harder, Phoebe, than fighting a losing battle to protect your own child, watching her learn to bear numb fingers, the sharp pain of breathing ice, teaching her not to cry when she can't get warm. I thought, sometimes, that war or catastrophe would be easier than relentless hunger and cold." She shifted beside me; Phoebe was watching with an almost painful compassion, but she didn't interrupt. "Every night, I wrapped her in my arms, in clothes and in blankets, and even then I spent half the night awake, waiting for – oh, God, Phoebe, I was waiting for her breath to slow and her skin to cool under my fingers." She laid her narrow fingers against my neck, and her pulse beat against mine. "I waited for her to die. It seemed so impossible that she wouldn't."

Phoebe bit at her lip. "And when did you stop worrying?"

It was with a hoarse whisper that my mother responded: "I never did."

* * *

Admiral Patterson had only been able to secure the channel for twenty minutes; Phoebe signed off reluctantly, brushing tears from her eyes and promising to send my mother letters. My mother abandoned her précis and the briefs, retreating into the master bedroom. She didn't sob or cry out, but I didn't wait for her to start, and to give her back her solitude I slipped out.

At first, I walked just to hear the sharp steps of the crewmen all around me and step through the doors that opened at my approach. Normally, I would have sought out Zayek, but I didn't know what to say to him, and the thought of the tiny cold transceiver still nestled in his pocket kept me away. I thought I knew him well, but the Zayek I knew never would have stolen the device, taken it from its cradle in the lab while Ada and Harry chased each other around the room, and then lied so unflinchingly to all of us. I hadn't even guessed that anything was wrong, in the transporter room or aboard _Voyager_ that last time, and it was this new, secretive Zayek that disturbed me more than the deadly potential of the device. I walked to keep him from my mind.

But I had been alone long enough. I knew there was a mess hall on the ship, but I doubted that I would feel any more welcome there than I did in the corridors. Instead, I teetered on my toes outside the quarters that Naomi and Juliet Jurot were sharing.

Juliet opened the door before I rang the chime and stepped aside to let me in without a word. She wasn't alone: Joe, B'Elanna, and Greg were clustered together on the couch, pouring over a single PADD, and Naomi lay on the carpet with Miral squirming on her belly. I sank down beside her, offering the baby my pinky to grab at. There were PADDs scattered across the coffee table, on the floor, even a few kicked under the couch: an embarrassment of information, after so long without.

B'Elanna was wiping tears from her eyes. "I knew that they were gone, but – there was nothing in the letters about this kind of – this – "

"Massacre?" Greg supplied dully.

"Maybe that's a blessing, B'Elanna," Joe said gently. His tight reddish curls, white at the roots, seemed greyer in the harsh lights, a work-worn hand rested on her knee.

She didn't shake him off, but turned to gaze out into the streaking stars. "I thought I'd imagined it, Joe. I thought I'd faced it. I programmed the holodeck with all my friends, burnt and murdered – but it was one atrocity. That war – it was hundreds."

Greg pushed the PADD away, looking more belligerent than I'd ever seen him. "If I had known – God, I was pounding flour and flirting with Eddie while – and I didn't even _think_ of them, not once since – "

I could see on his face that there were no words that were good enough, no reassurance that would absolve him. It didn't matter that he had been struggling to survive or that there was nothing he could have done, trapped on _Voyager_. It might have been common knowledge to Federation citizens, but the blunt truths of the war had sent him reeling. I had known him as a friend, a teacher, a father, but he had been a rebel and a soldier, and his cause, his army, was gone.

The silence stretched. Greg dropped his head into his hands, and after glancing from me to Naomi to Joe's stricken expression, B'Elanna hurriedly leaned forward and with pursed lips began shuffling through the PADDs on the table. "This one's for you, Naomi," she said. "It's your father's service record. And look, Joe – this is a newsweb article on your elder son – looks like he won the Hawking prize at the Academy."

"What did you do," I asked, "just search for any files relating to _Voyager_?" I reached under the table and picked up a few files. "This is a tabloid article about the unlikely romance between Seven of Nine and – "

"Yes," Naomi cut in, grinning up at me. "We went a little crazy." She took the PADD B'Elanna offered her, but before reading it tossed me another. "Check this one out: it's a summary of Delta Quadrant species, and it's _wildly_ inaccurate. It says Talaxians are quadrupeds."

B'Elanna smiled weakly. "There's a bunch of conspiracy theorists, too, who think that Chakotay deliberately collapsed the slipstream to send us all to an icy grave. Last cry of a terrorist. Or something." She slipped down to the floor, trailing a reassuring hand over Greg's knee, and kept nervously sorting the articles, setting some aside for survivors not there and handing out the rest. Juliet's mother was a columnist on Betazed; Tom's sisters had started a museum dedicated to what little information there was on _Voyager_; there was even a treatise on the psychology of my mother's command decisions, the salient conclusion being that the Delta Quadrant had unhinged her. "You're really going to throw them for a loop, Bea."

"_If _Kathryn goes public," Joe added. He scrolled eagerly through the PADD about his son, though the information it contained had to be ten years old; he seemed almost unaware of the tension in the room.

"She'd better," Naomi said, and I was surprised by the bite in her tone. She was deliberately avoiding the PADD clutched tightly in her hands, her eyes still fixed on the baby. "She kept that secret for too long."

Greg looked down at the top of Naomi's head. "She couldn't even tell us, Naomi. If we threatened her privacy, her sense of self – what will the media do?" He was the same tired, sad man I'd always known; the rebel had faded, but so had the cheerful rescuee from the picnic. "Will it be better, to put her in the spotlight again?"

No one answered. Paging through a collection of Chakotay's writings on life in the Delta Quadrant, I reflected that nothing had changed: my mother was still walled into her silence, now joined there by her crew, afraid of a media response I didn't yet understand. My father, imprisoned eleven decks away, was just as inaccessible as he had been before I knew his name. Starfleet had made us top-secret and compounded our isolation, trapping us with protocol just as surely as we'd been trapped by ice. Had Zayek realized that, down in the lab, and prepared to give up his future because of it?

Still, though: the air was clean and warm, and for the first time in my memory I was full. I stretched out my legs, nudging aside articles speculating on the physics of fluidic space and the uses of leola root, and if I didn't look to hard, I couldn't see Naomi's uncertainty or Joe's regret. I settled down to read in earnest, sinking into the comfortable silence we'd perfected on _Voyager_.

Chakotay's first essay began:_ "A lucky accident brought me back to the Federation. _

"_Ask the engineers, and they'll tell you I mean the slipstream; the diplomats will cite the turning tide of opinion surrounding the Dominion War. But I can't call the first luck, when it took my friends from me, and the latter seemed more inevitability than accident. No; a Cardassian Gul, a guardian on the verge of death, and a Starfleet captain with a spine of steel came together, and changed my life irrevocably."_

Maybe it was possible. A hundred PADDs here, thousands more yet to be downloaded – but maybe we could catch up on twenty years' history. The man who had written this had again stepped outside the Federation, driven by a sorrow still etched in his eyes, but perhaps I could get to know him anyway. Starfleet would release us eventually; the crew would return to families that had long since buried them, and maybe we would find space there. We would forget the cold nights and the weary days, and maybe someday the warmth and white noise of a living ship would be commonplace. And when that happened, I thought, marveling at the way the panels responded to the lightest tap of a finger, words standing out clear on the screen, maybe then I could convince Zayek to bury or turn in or smash the transceiver, and we wouldn't have to give up anything at all.

Maybe.


	11. Staying Warm

**Winter's Child, continued.

* * *

**

I took only the essays with me when I returned to my mother's quarters, and when I slid between the pale Starfleet-issue sheets I set them gently on the bedside table. My mother wrapped me in her arms and kissed my forehead, whispering only, "Stay warm, Bea," the same words she'd sent me to sleep with every night I could remember. She lingered in the doorway and I could tell that she had more to say, but she left the ritual intact, padding away without a word.

It had been a long day: I had woken that morning aboard _Voyager_, believing that the most exciting thing I'd do that day was confirm the physics of warp. Instead, I'd met my history and my future, and now I lay curled beneath a smooth new quilt on a ship moving steadily away from the only home I'd known. With my fingers, I reached out and touched the textured wall, the smooth polymer of the headboard; definitely not a Jefferies tube. The dark stretching above my head seemed vast, though the ceilings couldn't have been more than three meters, and I rolled over.

I wanted badly to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes worry nudged up against my eyelids. I could see the pity in LaForge's pale eyes, feel the tension in my mother's body as Chakotay kissed her goodbye, and more than anything else I could sense Zayek's lonely uncertainty a few rooms over. Much as I wanted to forget it, I played the scene out in my mind, wondering what I could have said.

When he had dropped it, neither of us had said a word, but I'm sure my shock spoke volumes. For a few minutes, it seemed like that little tangle of wires was the only thing in the world. Against the glowing deck plating, the green-grey steel looked sinister and out of place, but I could see where it would hook up to a tricorder, a power cell. Part of me had wanted to sweep it over the side of the chute, hope that it smashed below, but as I stared at it I couldn't resist figuring it out, naming the components and indicators, guessing their functions. It was irresistible: I reached and touched it, still warm from his pocket.

We had stayed like that for a long time, and when I couldn't discover any more about the device without taking it apart, I looked up at him. He had been my closest friend, and I could feel his wordless plea. He was on unfamiliar ground: uncertainty was something new for someone as measured and logical as he was, and he had been asking me to join at least in that uncomfortable indecision. Instead, I had swung myself down the ladder and into the next access tube I found.

I pulled the quilt up to my chin, scrunching my eyes against the need in his. I willed sleep to come, but though my muscles seemed to melt into the blankets with exhaustion my mind wouldn't stop. Everything was backward: logical Zayek was uncertain, and placid Naomi was angry. B'Elanna was crying, and I could only imagine Eddie, alone with his daughter, trying to reconcile her ambivalence with his own.

Around me, the ship hummed; I could hear the transfer relays, the murmur of voices in the quarters above and below, and the ever-present beat of the warp core through every console. Used to absolute silence, muffled by frost and deepened by fear, the sound was deafening to me. No matter how I buried my head beneath the blankets, I could feel the pulse of the ship around me, and when I opened my eyes the streaming stars were impossibly bright after sleeping in the close darkness of the Jefferies tubes.

And of course, I'd never slept by myself before. Though it was more than warm enough, I was used to the unruly tangle of my mother's limbs, her breath against the back of my neck as she held me close, the steady beat of her heart through her fingers. I stretched my legs out, feeling the edge of the bed with my toes, and met no barrier. It seemed remarkable to me that Phoebe's child – that every child in the Federation – went to sleep each night so alone. I could hear my mother's footsteps in the next room and hugged myself, imagining her arm snugly wrapped around my ribs to keep me warm.

Except that she didn't need to, not here. I was sweating inside the light sleepwear, and my bare toes poked out from under the blanket, seeking the slightly cooler air. The bed should have seemed like a luxury, after sharing a narrow mattress edged by insulated bulkheads, but it was stifling. I finally threw off the quilt, but that was no better: fourteen years' paranoia about frostbite and hypothermia made exposure just as unnerving.

I imagined Chakotay, alone on the hard bunk in the brig. Would he be released? Though I was well-versed in Federation law, thanks to interminable sessions with Tuvok, I had no sense of the environment that would push the security council to such harsh punishment. I could understand it – if everyone when around changing history when things went badly, things would get awfully messy – but still, the fact that Tessa, Harry, and Chakotay hadn't actually _done_ anything nagged at me, and no less than the carefully controlled grief on my mother's face as they were led away. If he was sent to prison, it would be like losing him again: the kind of happy ending I wanted for her didn't jibe with occasional visits through force fields.

With a glance toward the door, I gave up sleep, reached out for the PADD on the table and with some fumbling retrieved the emergency light from the drawer. My mother had shown me where it was with a rueful grin; the only lights we'd ever had in our sleeping quarters before were the dim lights below the tube decking and the faint glow of the gel packs. Something with a power cell and an on switch seemed an impossible luxury, but I retrieved the quilt and slid underneath it to hide the light from my mother's wakeful eyes. After blinking several times at the steady brightness, I returned to the first chapter of Chakotay's work. It was strange: the captain he described was vibrant, brash, and while I knew my mother to be as intelligent and as determined, somehow she was painted with paler colors than the Kathryn Janeway that Chakotay wrote about so eloquently. Beside that eager young captain, my mother seemed faded and grey.

"_It seemed an impossible compromise: asking rebels to put on the uniform of their enemy, and asking upstanding officers to work alongside those who had rejected the organization and ideals they held so dear. Any admiral would tell you it was insanity, and any cell leader would have rejected it out of hand. But feasibility has never fazed Kathryn Janeway. She saw what was best for her ship and new crew, both Starfleet and Maquis, and without hesitation pursued it. _

"_It was the first of many headstrong, unreasonable, and ultimately brilliant decisions that she made against my counsel. Looking back on it, I'm not sure what I thought the alternatives were – she could neither lock us all up nor let us go, as both spelled death for all of us. She could hardly run a civilian ship, as there was nothing we valued as payment, and in any case any attempt would have been met with cynicism and mistrust among the Maquis. No, she offered us the one thing we valued: her ideals, her hope, and her leadership. I accepted her offer and her uniform with trepidation, but I accepted. We all did._

"_I've been asked the question a thousand times: what was it about Kathryn Janeway that we trusted? I can only respond that it wasn't trust, exactly. Rather, it was a deep respect that even the most jaded rebels couldn't quite shake, that this was a woman who kept her promises, a captain who valued her crewmen, and an ally worth having. The uniforms chafed and the ranks grated on our ears, but she was the captain. Years after her disappearance, she still is."

* * *

_

Two chapters later, my eyes ached from reading the bright print and the light throbbed at my temples, but when I switched it off and laid back against the pillow sleep was no closer. The ship still murmured around me and the stars still streaked by the windows; I was still alone. Though I wasn't cold, I wrapped the quilt around my shoulders and padded to the door. The carpet against my bare feet, the almost imperceptible circulation of life support, the prompt swish of the door – it all reminded me just how different everything was, and was going to be.

In the adjoining master bedroom, the crisp corners of the bed were undisturbed. I found my mother instead curled up on the couch, a PADD in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. In the loose sleepwear, with her hair beginning to fall out of its neat knot, she looked more like the mother I remembered. When she saw me, she unfolded her legs to make room for me and laid down the PADD. Her hands curled around the metallic mug, and I tucked my legs beneath me, breathing in the rich scent of the coffee and the fainter scent of her clean skin.

"Can't sleep?" she asked finally.

I didn't answer, just reached out to take the mug from her. The coffee was bitter, scalding, and I made a face. Her lips twisted in a smile. "I know," she said. "It's an acquired taste, and one I seem to have lost." She took the cup back and set it on the table. "All those years, imagining the perfect cup of coffee, and somehow Tom's jury-rigged replicator did a better job."

It wasn't how I had imagined it, either; nothing was. "At least there's chocolate," I pointed out. "And books."

"Yes," she said, seriously. "And sonic showers."

"It's nice to be clean, isn't it?" I hugged my knees as her blue eyes welled with tears. "I knew what all those things looked like and how they worked – replicators and computers and showers and everything – but I never really understood how easy everything was."

"We didn't either, Bea. Not until we lost it." She tossed the PADD down between us; in a glance I saw that she was composing letters. "Wait until you see the holodeck. Or when we get to Earth – we'll spend a whole day barefoot in the grass."

"In the sun?" I smiled at the thought of daylight, and glanced up at the lights set into the ceiling, wondering how much brighter the direct light of Earth's star would be.

"You've never seen sunshine," she whispered; no answering grin lit up her face. Her head dropped down, and the lines of her body declared defeat. She didn't look at me when she spoke next, and I had to lean forward to hear her. "There's just no way I can ever make this up to you."

"It's not your fault," I said immediately, automatically. "I forgave you a long time ago, remember? And the day after tomorrow – "

"Stop taking care of me, Beatrice." Her voice was brittle. "I used to think that Naomi paid a terrible price by not growing up planetside, but – she knew what grass was, she got shore leave and the holodeck, and she had the database to teach her the rest. But you and Zayek, you've never – ". She stopped and steadied herself. "Everything that a child should take for granted, education and food, medicine and _sunshine_, will always seem like a novelty to you, won't it?"

"Not everything," I said softly. "I had a family."

She reached out for my hand. "Yes," she said. "You did, but no thanks to me. If I had just told you about your father – instead of being such a coward – "

"Mama." Tentatively, I stretched out a hand and lifted her chin, feeling very grown-up as I forced her to look at me. "Chakotay – I would have liked it, if you'd told me. But you made Tom and Maddie and B'Elanna and Joe and everyone into – and I didn't need to know." Now wasn't the time to tell her how angry and confused I'd been, to tell her that at seven I'd reimagined asexual reproduction to explain his absence. All that resentment was gone, trapped below the ice, too. "You gave me more than you realize."

She clenched her eyes shut, shaking her head. "It'll never be enough, Bea." She enclosed my hand in hers, holding it against her cool cheek. "You deserved more."

I knew then that there was nothing I could say, and no absolution I could offer. Being rescued hadn't erased the pains and privations of the last fifteen years; they only stood out sharper against the luxury of the modern Federation and the lives we should have led. Instead, I nosed my way up against her, tucking my head under her chin and listening to the shuddering of her breath as she tried not to cry.

Minutes passed before her breath steadied, and when she spoke she was my mother again. "Now, why can't you sleep?"

Ear against her beating heart, I opened my eyes. "You first."

She picked up the PADD still resting on her knee. "I was trying to write to Chakotay. LaForge won't let me visit any of them until the admiralty approves, and given Starfleet's current policies on treason I'm not holding my breath." She scrolled through the letter, and I could tell that it was made up of several half-finished paragraphs. "I wanted to tell him - that night was so out of character for me, Beatrice, but I wanted him to know, once and for all - and I wanted to tell him about you. How quick and kind and impossibly good you are." She blinked the tears from her eyes. "You know, Bea, I spent years composing this in my head, but I can't seem to get it down. It's all so _tangled_ now."

Me, Tessa, and fifteen years of mourning: what had seemed so natural on their last night in the Delta Quadrant had grown into something complicated, but I didn't know how to untangle it, either. Instead, I answered her question. "It's too warm to sleep."

She shifted, and I raised my head to look at her. So close, I could see the papery lines spidering from her eyes, the creases worn around her mouth by a thousand crooked smiles. "Computer," she said, slowly, "Reduce ambient temperature by five degrees centigrade." Laying the PADD down on the table, she stood up and pulled me to my feet. "Better?"

I could feel the cooler air circulating already. "Still too noisy," I said softly. She glanced out at the darkened living room and the small bedroom beyond, then walked toward the double bed and turned down the pale grey sheets. I stepped toward the door, but stopped. "And the stars are so bright."

She slid, narrow feet first, into the bed, and after a pause held open the blankets for me. "They are, aren't they?" Though the bed was wide, habit and invisible Jefferies tube walls crowded us close. "Computer, decrease lights."

If I squeezed my eyes shut, I couldn't see the stars or the faint glow of the wall consoles, and with my mother's wiry arms wrapped around me, the rush of her blood and her even breath almost overpowered the ship's hum. The air was almost cold, and I snuggled into her embrace, pretending just for the space of my dreams that Chakotay and Harry hadn't come yet, that my world was intact. And if we were still on _Voyager_, curled in the darkness, dreaming of rescue, I could imagine that the lives that waited for us were bright, untouched by Starfleet's response to a war we'd never anticipated, unmarred by fifteen years' loss.


	12. Problem Solving

**Winter's Child, continued.

* * *

**

_"She was a study in contrasts. As the captain, she was ruled by unyielding morals and a fierce intelligence; children and muttering Maquis would be forgiven for wondering if she slept in her uniform. As a friend, though, she was spontaneous and sensual, and she delighted in good food, holographic moonlight, and the written word."_

"Bea!"

"Coming," I called back. I sat on the edge of the bed, balancing the PADD on my knee while I pulled my socks on. Chakotay's essays were a welcome distraction from the prospect of the _Challenger_'s schoolroom, where the children would pass the morning while the adults were debriefed via subspace.

_"Wary of her, at first I wasn't sure which was the act. Which was real, the brassy officer, who nonchalantly stared down the machismo of a Kazon Maje, or the romantic who I caught reading Dante at 0200 instead of completing her crew evaluations? In the end, it was the contradictions that convinced me. She ran a tight ship, yet she had a soft spot for misfits; she didn't trust spirituality, but more than once I would have sworn I heard her whisper a prayer. The two Kathryns were hopelessly opposed, yet I finally realized that even she couldn't have separated them."_

"Beatrice Teya Janeway." My mother leaned on the door frame, . "Coming, eh?" I smiled up at her sheepishly, wondering where those two Kathryns had gone. I could see the traces of that steely glint and that irrepressible exuberance, but both where muted in her now, tempered by years and sorrow. What was the officer without the bravado, or the unsensual romantic? I hadn't understood before what must have been obvious to the survivors: she was still the captain, but the woman who had lived so fully and immediately was gone. And if she had lost that uniting spark that made her whole, then I had never known Tom or Naomi or Joe, either; were they all so broken? I glanced down at the PADD one more time.

_"What impressed me most, I think, was that while for many that struggle between duty and compassion, the official and the private, the self and the soul brings only frustration and fragmentation, somehow it completed her, and it always seemed to me that she embraced the challenges of being captain and Kathryn with imperfect joy."_

Joy? Determination, anger, guilt, resignation, yes, but never happiness. I tossed the PADD on the bed and followed her from the room, imagining a living, breathing ship, where being the captain would be an occasion for excitement. There would be room for pride and posturing, misfits and Dante, and for joy - and how different would it be, to be loved by a mother like that?

* * *

"It isn't enough."

Zayek and I were sitting side by side at a long table in the _Challenger_'s only classroom. Long-term assignments weren't uncommon on Galaxy-class ships, but there were still only a few children on board, and we were separated into two groups by age. Harry and Ada had been drawn into some inscrutable art project, and we sat solving equations, separated from the neat Federation children by experience and empty air.

The words surprised me; I hadn't meant to say them. We were at the far end of the table, wrangling with mathematics software, trying to ignore the flickering glances of the other students and the solicitous gaze of the senior teacher, a Mr. Drayton. The calculations were simpler than those we'd done with Tuvok and my mother, nothing like the fractal reductions that had plagued us that last morning, but we couldn't get the computer model to work right, and I at least felt like a dunce next to the other children. In my frustration, the words just slipped out.

Zayek looked up at me. I hadn't spoken to him since the teacher had sat us down with the tutor console, and he had honored my silence. We worked together easily without words, taught by years of companionable rewiring and bean-picking, but from the way he kept his eyes fixed on the screen I knew that he was still hurt and confused. Now, though, his brown eyes were opened wide, and it was my turn to stare stubbornly at the misbehaving equations.

"What do you mean?" he whispered, hands still on the keypad.

I glanced toward the instructor; he was at the other end of the table, leaning over two other students. "It's just – Zayek, yesterday when I left, I wanted to believe that everything was fixed. And I've been trying my hardest to pretend that it is."

His voice was low. "But it's not?"

I hit the "execute" command, and watched my model turn into meaningless garbage; it would have taken me fifteen minutes to solve by hand. "No. I thought – well. I thought being on a ship again, having life support and replicators and a computer core, would bring them all back to themselves. You know." I looked away from the static on the screen, finally meeting his eyes. The delicate truth, drawn from Chakotay's essays and my sleepless night, sounded so foolish now. "I hoped my mother would be the intrepid Kathryn Janeway again, and Tom the flyboy, and Naomi would somehow get her childhood back."

"I know," he said, and though I knew what I'd said was silly, there was no ridicule in his tone. "I wanted to throw it away, Bea. I wish I could."

"I know," I echoed. The thing was, I did: as badly as I wanted that transceiver gone, so I could stop second-guessing every luxury the Federation offered, its possibilities were almost hypnotic. I knew that if it were nestled in my pocked, I'd keep it, too.

"How are you guys doing?"

We both looked up, startled; the instructor had made his way around the table, and now stood over us, looking askance at the tangled mess of our model. "Fine," I said, blushing slightly.

"Hmm." He leaned over and cleared the screen, resetting the problem. "It looks like you're having some trouble. Give it another shot, and this time consider the derivative regression – "

"Of the mainline variable, yes," Zayek finished, impatient with Drayton's drawl. Mathematics had never really interested him, but at that moment, in the middle of that conversation, he cared less than usual. The instructor nodded, a little taken aback at his abruptness. As he walked away, Zayek leaned toward me and said, just loud enough to be heard over the beeping of tutor consoles all around us, "We're going to spend a lifetime learning the things we should have known all along."

"Like stupid modeling programs." The equation blinked on the screen. "But – Zayek, it's going to be inconvenient and hard, getting to know how people are supposed to be and how Federation citizens are supposed to live when they're not half frozen and too sad to breathe, but it doesn't seem like a reason to just - end it."

"It's not just inconvenient." The flat calm was back in his voice, but he tugged nervously at one of his dark curls. "It's just - clinging to survival in a harsh, hopeless environment makes generous, innovative people desperate and afraid. I think that we won't recover, and we'll never belong here." He took a deep breath, leaning still closer; he stared at the console, but I stared at his angular profile. "Still, I want to live. I don't want to lose the little I have, either, Bea."

I swallowed, hard; he knew me too well. Even knowing that those who had raised me were shadows of themselves, I still didn't want to give any of them up. "Then why haven't you thrown it away?"

"If it were just our lives, you, me, our parents, all the survivors – if it were just us, I might." He took a steadying breath. "It's a core tenet of Vulcan philosophy, Bea, that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. But I believe it is universal to all civilizations, really: individuals sacrifice themselves and their personal interests for the benefit of the larger population." He looked up at me, begging me to agree.

"Mathematics, not philosophy, you two." Drayton was back, and annoyingly cheerful. "Now, you still seem to be having trouble."

I looked from Zayek to Drayton to the screen; we hadn't gotten past the initial problem. "Sorry, sir," I said, busying myself the keys. With a phenomenal burst of color, the tri-D grid twisted into a new, and still totally wrong, jumble of lines.

"I know you two have some experience with theoretical math, but maybe statistical calculus was the wrong starting place. It can be pretty tough to wrap your head around," he said. "Maybe something a little easier – "

"Actually, sir, we know the answer." Unlike Zayek, I liked mathematics, and I didn't want to be the target of the instructor's well-meaning condescension. "We just can't the model to reflect it. We've never worked with computers before."

A smile played around Drayton's lips; he didn't believe us. "It's not easy to solve this type of problem without a model, Beatrice, though there are several related fields you might be used to working in. Why don't you give it another shot?"

I reset the problem one more time as he walked away, but I let my hands just rest on the panel. Finally, I said softly, "But who are the many, Zayek? There's a whole universe that would be affected, and we can't know which course of action best serves _their _interests." I forced myself to think about it logically, impartially; it was just another scenario in Tuvok's Starfleet policy class, another complex equation to be balanced before my mother would let us go.

"That's a simplistic argument, because on a universal scale there is no 'greater good,'" Zayek responded, carefully. "It cannot be quantified. What benefits one world may mean destruction to the next, and most effects are far less dramatic and far more difficult to classify. I think we must only consider those things we can directly assess – namely, the lives of the _Voyager_ crew. The rest is beyond our understanding and control, and there is nothing we can do to change that."

"Well, we can leave it alone," I retorted. I was overwhelmed by the scale of the universe and the impossible number of variables involved, and I suddenly felt very tired.

"We can't," he said, a little too loudly. Several other children looked around at us and smothered giggles. "We can't," he repeated, in a low voice. "Whatever we do, we will be choosing. The power is in our hands, and we change history by action or inaction."

"There is no passive course," I murmured. He nodded mutely, staring unseeingly at the display. "But – do we have the right?"

"No," he said immediately. I turned to look at him, surprised. "Not at all. But that we are even having this conversation suggests that it is as much our decision as anyone's. It wasn't Harry or Chakotay's decision, either, but they were prepared to make it. The decision to destroy the array was not really your mother's to make, but it fell to her. Perhaps having the 'right' to decide is really only a question of being the person who is forced to do it."

"Stop being so logical." His face was inches from my own, and I dropped my voice still further. "These are our lives, Zayek,"

"I know that," he said, and anyone who hadn't know him so long would never have heard the quaver in his voice. "There are very good reasons, emotionally, to do or not do it. We want to live; we want those we love to not suffer. Those should be the same goal, but here they are opposed: we only live in this timeline, and that one is where their happiness lies. I don't think the two can be reconciled." He exhaled heavily. "Logic is all I have, Bea."

"What does logic say, then?"

"To do it." His answer was immediate, his certainty damning. It seemed out of place in that bright room, full of the laughter of children who'd never been faced with hunger, let alone a decision so difficult. "It's simple: our lives for theirs. The five of us for 126 crewmen, and happiness of the thirteen survivors." He rocked a little on his chair, the magnitude of what he was saying sinking in. In his tone I heard a hint of desperation. "We're _Voyager_'s crew, Bea, aren't we? Don't we save them?"

I thought about that; most of the crewmen had never known me, but I knew them better than anyone except my mother. Their blankets had kept me warm, their books had taught me, and their stories had sustained all of us. Didn't I owe them, after they'd done so much for me? Were their lives worth mine?

"How's it coming?"

Both Zayek and I recoiled. Drayton still had that smile on his face, and we still hadn't solved the problem. Before he could recommend that we downgrade to basic algebra, Zayek sketched a probability model in the air. "The chart should trend toward infinity where z is greater than the sum of x and y for all t," he said, gesturing back at the initial equation set. "There's a fundamental instability in all other regions, except where the independent variable is zero." He ran his hands over the imaginary statistical curves again. "We told you. We've never worked with computers before, but we know the answer."

"The solution set is a system of seven equations," I added. "The first is the simplest – it relates x and t by the z-dependent product of the initial regression mode. Do you want me to recite the others?"

Drayton raised his eyebrows. "You guys like math?"

"Not really," Zayek said, shrugging. He watched as Drayton crossed the room to consult with one of the other instructors, then looked back at me, steady as always. My best friend, able to visualize regression models while logic chipped away at his right to live; I couldn't tell whether the twist in my stomach was laughter or sorrow. "So?" he asked me, and I knew what my answer had to be.

"We don't have the right," I said, resting my gaze on the endless stars outside the window. "You said it: not at all. But maybe we have the responsibility."

* * *

It's surprisingly easy to focus on the means to an end, without thinking too hard about what that end is. People have done it throughout history. Nobel invented dynamite, Feynman helped develop nuclear missiles during the Second Terran World War, Renok of Vulcan created phased laser weaponry, and Starfleet's own Lyster only adapted that technology to hand-held phasers because a colleague bet her that she couldn't. Their devastating effects paled beside the challenges of splitting the atom or phasing light in a chamber the size of a baby's toe – and what scientist could resist a problem like that?

Sending a message to the past might have been ethically questionable and emotionally complex, but it was still the best puzzle we'd ever solved. The transceiver was decades more advanced than _Voyager_'s Borg technology, and it took us a while to sort through the relays and connections. What we needed was a simple operating system that would serve as a bridge between Starfleet software and Borg hardware, something to tell the computer what message to send, and when. To kids who had only ever worked with flickering oxygen production systems and the isolated circuitry of gel packs, the depth and complexity of the programming language was unimaginable, but with Zayek's determined research through the _Challenger_'s database and the fact that the Borg spoke in the kind of complex mathematics I'd never been able to resist, we persevered.

It took us nearly nine hours to write the program. We left the schoolroom at 1300 hours, the instructor's murmured injunction to Tom about our "potential, despite an extremely uneven education" still ringing in our ears. The rest of the adults were still in debriefing; from the sound of things, the admirals' main concern was that they understand the party line upon their return to Earth. Tom, distracted by their attitude and worried about Miral, who didn't seem to be adapting well to the change in temperature, took Harry and Ada with him to his quarters but let Zayek and I return to my mother's, where we got started right away.

Holed up in my room, dozens of PADDs scattered across the bed, we lost ourselves in the challenge, and several times we despaired: it just didn't seem possible. More than once, I berated Zayek for not taking any of Harry's research with him from the lab, too. When we finally hooked it up to a display console, though, our translation program did exactly what we needed it to: it asked where, when, and what. We both stared at the blinking cursor on the little screen, in disbelief: could it really be so easy?

Zayek let out his breath noisily. "Seven of Nine's cortical index, the necessary time index, and… the correction."

"That might be a problem," I said, slowly. "The cortical stamp we can get, I think, from the undamaged portions of _Voyager_'s computer core; LaForge ordered them uploaded, and the serial number should be included in Seven's medical records. Or it'll be on some transporter log somewhere." He nodded, and I continued. "The time index is just a little before the one that Beth calculated, and you and I know that one." Beth had spent years working to arrive at that number, along with the probable coordinates of the planet: I wasn't likely to forget it.

"And the correction?"

I drummed my fingers on the floor. "That's the problem," I said. "Borg technology, sure, but what do you know about slipstream maintenance? None of that's going to be on the salvaged database. Engineering was too heavily damaged."

"I know how the drive worked," he pointed out. "B'Elanna made sure of that."

"True." I was sure that if we asked, B'Elanna or Joe or Maddie could tell me exactly the phase variance of the slipstream, and exactly what it should have been – I guessed that it was burned onto their memories. Enough time and research, and we could work out Harry's correction for ourselves. But I couldn't think of how to explain to any of them why I suddenly cared, not now that the wreckage of the core was no longer our constant companion. "But this could take weeks. Months, even."

"Well," Zayek said, bracingly, "The past will always be there, Bea."

"Yes, but – " I pushed myself to my feet, and started pacing around the small room. "We can't wait, Zayek. First of all, I'm going to lose my nerve, and what if sunshine is too wonderful to give up? And then, there's security – at some point, it's going to occur to them that the transceiver might be around, and there are scanners and sensors and transport filters – "

"Okay, okay." He stood up too, and began to tidy the PADDs scattered across the white quilt. "So we need a faster answer, or we need to give up."

I helped him pick up the PADDs, thinking furiously. As we disconnected the transceiver from the module and wrapped it in a pillowcase, I said slowly, "You know, we have those numbers memorized because Beth spent years on them. It wasn't even our research and we know it by heart."

Zayek slid the bundle under my bed; we agreed that the less we carried it, the better. "Yes," he said cautiously. My arms full of PADDs, I leaned toward him, but spun around when I heard the main door slide open.

"Beatrice?" my mother called. By the time I entered the living room she had kicked off her shoes and was distractedly pulling the pins from her hair. "Oh, good; you're here. Hello, Zayek."

"Hello," he said, evenly.

"Have you two eaten? I can't believe that we were in debriefing for thirteen _hours_," she said, glancing at the chronometer. "What have you been up to?"

"Oh, just… reading," I said, shrugging, my arms still full. "Lots to catch up on."

She picked the topmost PADD from the stack and raised her eyebrows. "Starfleet computer languages?" She scrolled through it before reaching for the next. "Advanced universal programming dialects? I would have thought you'd start with more… general knowledge."

"We had some trouble with the educational modeling systems today," I confessed. She laughed and dropped the two back on the pile. "Apparently, it's more important to know how to work a computer than solve the problem you're set without it."

"I heard about that from Tom," she said, an uneven smile on her face as she settled down onto the couch, shaking her hair out of its coil. "But you still solved the problem, right?"

"All nine of them," Zayek said flatly. "Statistical calculus, physical suprema, probability dynamics… without the computer."

She laughed. "Good to remind them that people were doing mathematics long before Federation educational standards came along," she said.

"I'm not sure that our instructor saw it that way," I said, dropping the PADDs into one chair and sitting on the arm. "How's the admiralty?"

She wrinkled her brow. "Talk about not seeing it that way," she said, sighing. "We spent hours verifying Kim and Chakotay's original reports, as well as all the Flyer's logs. They refused to believe that they might be telling the truth about anything that happened before the crash; apparently, treason makes everything you've ever said suspect." She leaned her head all the way back, staring upside down at the stars. "It's going to be an uphill battle, I think, getting any kind of fair treatment for them."

"What about us?" I asked.

"We spent another few hours convincing them that we didn't know anything about that blasted transceiver," she said, pulling her head up again, just missing the glance I flashed Zayek. "I think we proved our innocence, and we'll just have to sign confidentiality statements, swearing us to silence for a few months until the hullabaloo blows over. They'll probably send us quietly to our families, though, rather than keep us on a Starfleet compound somewhere. Locking us up would be a greater fuss than arranging transport for nine graying ex-officers and six young Federation citizens."

"We don't get a parade?"

"_Voyager_ was Starfleet's lost lamb, from what I understand, and after the Dominion War, everyone wanted a mascot. When they had to give up the search – well, I can't imagine public opinion was very positive." I made to interrupt, but she held up a hand. "You heard Admiral Patterson, Bea: they're more afraid of negative press than anything else. A parade would just call attention to the fact that Starfleet gave up, and when it gets out that they abandoned the brave, breathing crew of _Voyager _to an icy grave – "

"I get it," I said, shaking my head. "So we wait."

"Yes," she said simply. We were quiet, for a moment, my mother melting into the couch, me perched on the arm of the chair, and Zayek standing, hands clasped behind his back. Finally, she turned toward him. "You should go, Zayek," she said, as though only just remembering that he was there. "Your mother will be wondering where you are, and we should all get some sleep. And there are things that you – that you need to discuss."

He nodded mutely; in the last few hours, excited by the orderly computer languages, he had been able to forget that his parents had only been drawn together through circumstance, and that now those circumstances had now changed. I sprang to my feet, and walked him to the door. "It's going to be okay," I said, trying to answer the plea hidden in his seriousness. I dropped my voice to a whisper and leaned into the corridor. "I don't think we have to recalculate it. I think - there's someone who should know."

His lips twitched, and he impulsively squeezed my hand before he turned away. I watched him go; he seemed so small, dodging between the crewmen as he ran toward Maddie's quarters. If I was right, we would have everything we needed to make sure Zayek was never born. The knowledge was impossible, almost nauseating: who would I be without him?

But he had said it: we were _Voyager_'s crew, as much as she had one, and we owed something to the ship and those who served her. He disappeared around the corner, and I ducked back into the quarters, surprised at how calm I felt. I could already feel the gaping hole inside me that his absence would leave, even if I never knew him. I explored it: a dull ache, somewhere below my heart. If somehow I still existed on the other side of history, I couldn't imagine not missing him – but I would be able to live with the lack.

I stacked up the PADDs again and deposited them on my desk, nudging the lumpy pillowcase with the transceiver further under the bed with my toe. A tiny part of me still wanted to grind it under my heel, but the things I had to hold onto – my mother's fragmented, desperate love, Zayek's friendship, shot through with his guilt, an intimate familiarity with a crippled ship – seemed insufficient. No: my needs were not enough.

Instead, I walked over the replicator. I considered asking for coffee, but I settled on a mug of hot, unsweetened tea, not unlike the stuff that Joe used to brew. I held it out to her when I returned to the living room, and she wrapped her slender fingers against it. Together, we breathed in the steam. Somehow, the almost-familiar smell was as welcoming, as fortifying in the safety of our guest quarters as it had been in the frozen conference room.

"Thank you, Bea," she said, sipping the bitter tea. "That's exactly what I needed."


	13. Answers

**Winter's Child, continued.

* * *

**

It should have been easier, the second night, to sleep on a living, humming ship, but it wasn't; the warp core was just as persistent, the stars still so bright. Worse, the transponder under my bed worried and distracted me, until it was all that I could do to not drag it out and recheck all our calculations.

When I padded barefoot into my mother's room, she was reading in bed, the lights low, one hand behind her head. She didn't say anything as I crawled across the bed, just pushed down the blankets absently and shifted as I slid in beside her. After a few moments, she held the PADD at arms' length and read aloud: "_I am often asked whether we were lovers, Kathryn and I. It would be a good story, certainly, the whirlwind romance between the terrorist and the straight-laced Starfleet captain, but the truth is much more complex, as truths tend to be. I can only say that I trusted her, that I admired her, that I never tired of her company, and that I would gladly have followed her to hell. If that is love, and I think it is, then I loved her._"

She sighed, and laid the PADD down. "Chakotay's _Notes_," she explained. "He mentions the whole crew, various missions, several bizarre cultures we stumbled upon, but the whole book seems to be about me, Bea."

I shrugged, staring up at the ceiling. It seemed simple enough to me. "He loved you." I didn't say that I had read the same passage, searching for a hint of myself, the unlikely gamble of their last night, and found nothing.

"He did," she said, softly. "I just wish that I had realized how deeply. Or that my career would end on an icy rock, and all those protocols wouldn't matter worth a damn in the end." There was a note of rueful desperation in her tone, a frustrated resignation that I thought Chakotay's beloved captain never would have admitted. She snuggled down beside me, ordering the computer to dim the lights and pressed her cold feet against mine. It seemed cruel, that she should have to hear those words secondhand, in memoirs written for a dead woman. She sighed again, and idly ran a finger over my hair. "But I'm not sure it would have changed anything, really. I would probably still be as hardheaded. And what's past is past." I thought again of the pillowcase under my bed: sometimes, the past wasn't past, at all. Provided, of course, that Harry Kim was the kind of man I thought he was.

"Stay warm," she murmured, and I bit back a retort about her icy toes.

* * *

"We want to talk to Harry Kim."

The officer in front of the door was grim in his dark uniform, and determined to be unhelpful; this was not the picture that Tom and Joe had given me of Starfleet. "Sorry. My orders are to keep the conspirators isolated."

"Conspirators." Zayek shrugged and turned away; his uncertainty was gone, and under his calm I saw frustration. "Come on, Bea. This isn't going to work."

"No," I said, crossing my arms. "We just want to talk to Harry. All he's guilty of is trying to save us, and I don't see why he shouldn't have visitors."

"Look, I have my orders." The guard straightened in front of the door, and he seemed to grow a few centimeters as he returned to attention.

"You look," I snapped, trying to imagine the Kathryn Janeway that Chakotay had described. _She started with me, staring down the Maquis cell leader standing with a rifle on her bridge, but she didn't flinch at the Kazon, the Borg, the Hirogen._ A security guard wouldn't have fazed her. "He's in there because he's protecting us. You know about this 'conspiracy' plot? He could have gone through with it, but he decided to let us keep on living." I dropped my arms to my sides, and took a step towards him. "So we get to say thank you."

Though the _Challenger_ wasn't the flagship, the security officer was clearly an intelligent, dedicated ensign who had probably been at the top of his class. Still, he was no match for 'Fleet refugees; he was only ten years older than I, and had likely grown up with the search for _Voyager_ on the news nets and read Chakotay's _Notes on an Extraordinary Voyage_ in grade school. Had he, like Commander Luta, studied my mother at the Academy? He hesitated, and I made the decision for him.

"Fifteen minutes," I said, grabbing Zayek's hand and pushing past the guard. He reached an arm out, as though to restrain us, but I had guessed right: in midair, he changed his mind and tapped the door panel instead, unlocking it.

"Fifteen minutes," he said, tersely. "I'm Ensign Bendala – contact me when you're done. And this never happened, understood?"

I nodded hastily. "Thank you," I said, ducking through the door, "We'll be – "

"Go," he hissed, tapping the panel again to close the door. Inside, there were no guards; apparently, force fields, half-meter walls, and an officer outside the door with a phaser rifle were considered enough protection. A quick glance around told me that there were no Jefferies tubes access doors: the walls were smooth, the floors uncarpeted and the deck plating unbroken. Before us, a wide, brightly-lit hallway stretched perhaps fifteen meters, with cells set on either side. Three of them had lit panels, indicating active force fields.

I took a deep breath, glancing at Zayek for reassurance before starting down the passage. Our footsteps rang on the decking, and for the first time I let myself worry: what if Harry couldn't remember the correction? When I had imagined this conversation, I hadn't thought about Chakotay and Tessa being in the same room, but it wasn't Harry in the first cell.

Chakotay hadn't moved, though he must have heard us; he probably assumed that we were particularly light-footed ensigns. I couldn't help but slow down as we passed his cell; he sat on the floor against the side wall, arms resting on his bent knees, eyes closed. He looked older than he had on the _Flyer_, his cropped hair grayer, and I contrasted his stillness with my mother's nervous pacing. It seemed that they would fit together seamlessly, her restless tension and his anxious calm. How many ways, I wondered, did they complement each other?

"Bea," Zayek murmured. Chakotay turned sharply at the word, and his eyes widened in surprise when he saw us.

"I can't ask you," I said sharply, before he could speak. I glanced down at the PADD in my hands, just to have something else to look at. In the next cell, Harry was already on his feet; across the aisle, Tessa watched, perched on the narrow bunk. I could hear Chakotay shifting behind us, pushing himself up and crossing to where he could look into the passage, but I resolutely looked ahead. "Harry?"

He stood still, for all the world like a cadet at parade rest. I wondered for a moment how long he had stayed in Starfleet and played the upstanding ensign before his loyalties to ship and crew had taken over. High treason or no, that Academy-trained precision was still second nature to him, but that military calm had come with a sense of duty that had etched deep lines in his face and, I imagined, cracks in his soul.

"We need your help," I said, softly, moving further from Chakotay's cell.

"How did you even get in here?" he asked, still guarded. I could feel Tessa's eyes boring into my back, and stepped a little closer to the force field.

"It doesn't matter," I said. "We only have a few minutes, but we need to ask you… what exactly were you going to send to Seven of Nine?"

"LaForge sent you, didn't he?" He crossed his arms across his chest. "Still haven't found the transceiver. How many times do I have to tell him I didn't touch it? It's still in the lab as far as I –"

"The captain didn't – " I began, but I stopped. "Harry. We know you didn't hide the transceiver, and LaForge doesn't seem to be the kind of captain who sends teenagers to do his dirty work. Our question is ours." I met his eyes. "Please. What was the correction?"

"Why?" Chakotay's voice was strong, and Zayek turned to look at him. I couldn't; it would have been too easy, to spend those fifteen minutes with my father, and equally easy for him to convince me without saying a word that gambling on this timeline was worth it.

"Harry, please," I pressed. Harry's dark eyes flicked from me toward the wall that hid Chakotay. Zayek shifted beside me. We had tried to come up with a good story, but there was no getting around the fact that talking our way past a guard to ask such a sensitive question of accused felons was more than scientific curiosity. In the end, we had decided to simply ask; they would guess why, but they wouldn't have to admit it.

I hadn't anticipated, though, the gravity in Chakotay's tone. "Why do you want it, Beatrice?" Gone was the sorrow-driven friend, the haunted lover; inches from the force field stood the Maquis captain, the Starfleet commander, a man with an iron core sheathed in velvet. I turned then, knowing that Harry wouldn't help until we had answered that question, and faced my father.

He stood taller, firmer; this was the man who had stood up to my mother, who had fought and challenged her, the man who had made his eventual support worth winning and his love worth returning. I straightened my shoulders, too, because I had in me not only that iron but the steel behind my mother's blue eyes. She wouldn't have backed down, not when she knew that her course was the right one.

"We're going to use it," I said evenly, hoping that only I heard the tremor in my voice.

He had suspected, of course; he wouldn't have confronted us otherwise. But his eyes widened when I said it. Had he thought that I would avoid the question, lie to him when asked directly? "I see," he said softly, firmly. "We can't let you do that, Beatrice."

"I think you can," I said, just as firmly.

"Circumstances – " he began, but I cut across him.

"Have changed, yes, you all keep saying that," I said. Zayek moved closer to me. "But I don't – _we_ don't think they've changed enough." I heard Harry's sharp intake of breath, Tessa's footfalls as she crossed to the force field of her cell, too. "There were ten survivors. Ten people you thought you'd never see again, and then – Harry has a namesake, there's a nine-week-old baby, and you have a daughter. Erasing history now must feel like – like – "

"Compounding failure with betrayal," Zayek filled in, his voice hollow. "Hurting us even more than we've already been hurt by the crash."

"And that's why we _can't_," Harry said, and there was a note of pleading in his words. "It's my fault that the ship crashed. I couldn't ask you to – how was I supposed to take away what you had left?"

I turned to him, tearing myself from Chakotay's earth brown eyes. "What do we have, Harry? Really?"

The words echoed off the deck plating, but he didn't answer. Zayek took a step toward him, running a hand through his curls and tugging on an ear. "We have our lives," he said steadily. "That's what you're thinking. We're alive, and miraculously, there's new life, but for the last fifteen years we've been cold and hungry and alone, and that doesn't end because this ship has functioning environmental controls. How can I make you understand what it's been like for us?" He took a deep breath, drawing his thoughts from the the silent room, the warm, still air. "Naomi Wildman lost her mother when she was three. She's eighteen now, a grown-up orphan going to meet a father that she doesn't know, a staid, solemn adult who's never had the opportunity to fall in love. She has lost her childhood, and nothing will bring it back."

"Or – or Tuvok," I added, laying my hand on Zayek's shoulder as he stiffened. "He's been missing his wife and children, but he has to bring his betrayal to back to them. He doesn't get his vows back."

Harry looked down at that, and the air was thick with steadfast Tuvok's shame. "My mother," Zayek almost whispered, his eyes fixed on Harry's shadowed face, "was twenty-nine when she chose to have a child with a man who couldn't love her, because it was _necessary_. Forget the lieutenant in stellar cartography she hadn't finished mourning yet; she had to raise a son who never should have been born. There's nothing left of the life she should have lead."

I felt him trembling under my hand, and there was a moment of profound silence. "It's not going to work," Chakotay said finally. "We know it was hard for all of you, but we took that into account when we made our decision."

"You _didn't_ make the decision," I retorted. "You abstained from it. All of you, just stepped back because you couldn't stomach giving up the friends you'd spent so many years missing and Miral's blue eyes were suddenly more important than the 126 bodies we left behind." His stillness was almost unbearable, and I began to pace up and down the hall. "And _hard_? What does that mean? _Hard_ is supposed to mean – I don't know, learning to speak Klingon or fix a replicator. Not starving and freezing, growing up among the dead. That's not hard, it's – " I fumbled for a word, then remembered what my mother had said to Admiral Patterson. "It's hell."

"I understand that you're frustrated, Beatrice, but – "

"You understand?" I stopped in front the cell and put my hands on my hips. "What do you understand, Chakotay?" I pronounced his name as my mother had, precisely, each syllable perfectly formed. "Because here are a few things that I think you can't possibly _understand_." I took a steadying breath, and dropped my voice. "If little Harry were here, he'd tell you that his mother cried herself to sleep every night for fifteen years, not for her friends or her lost home but because she was _cold_. Did you ever see B'Elanna cry?"

Chakotay's shoulders slumped almost imperceptibly, and I pressed on. "Do you understand that Tom finally became the kind of man his father would be proud of?" I felt a twinge at the thought of Admiral Paris, probably just now rejoicing over his grandchildren, but if they helped us, the admiral would meet them all the sooner. "He's a pilot and a husband and a father, but he watched his ship freeze and his wife despair and held his children closer every hour to keep them warm. You can't change that by _understanding_ it.

"Or my mother." I dropped my hands from my hips and stepped closer to him again. "You understand her, Chakotay, better than anyone. Imagine her, raising a child without a father, being a woman without a lover, captaining a dead ship. Back on Earth, with you in jail and her ship trapped under a glacier a quadrant away, she'll still be – she'll still be what she's become." I nervously tucked a strand of hair back, and Chakotay followed the motion. "It's not enough. Can't you see that?"

"I can't let you give up your lives – " he began again, sounding tired and sad but no less firm.

"And what about the dead?" Zayek demanded, his voice low and hard as ice. "You all feel responsible for them, but we've walked among them our whole lives. Could you live for fifteen _years_ among ghosts, and then leave them there? Because I can't." He turned around slowly, finally meeting my eyes. "For them, and for my father, I would give up everything." He closed his eyes. "Everything," he repeated, giving equal weight to each syllable.

There was nothing to be said to that: if they had thought that we were asking for the correction in ignorance or naiveté, our measured response made that impossible. But our fifteen minutes were already passed, and neither of them volunteered the correction either. I looked between them, but Chakotay's expression was stubborn and sad, and Harry avoided my gaze.

"Okay," I said, my voice breathy and breaking in my own ears. I slipped the PADD into my pocket and turned toward the door. "Well. Thank you, for – bringing us back to the Federation, then, even if you won't help us to – to set things right."

"I'm sorry," Harry said, and I didn't turn around again, just imagined his head hanging, his gaunt face pale. "Please understand. I just can't."

I nodded: I did understand, but there was nothing I could say to his misguided caution and charity. Glancing one more time at Chakotay, I couldn't suppress a shudder of anger. How could he love my mother and subject her to the last fifteen years? And yet, his eyes were haunted, and I knew that underneath all his rationalizations, he simply couldn't bear to lose her again. I bit my lip, held my anger close for a moment, and then forgave him for his love.

"Wait."

Almost to the door, Zayek and I turned together. Tessa was standing by the force field, agitation in the bold lines of her face. "I don't know the correction, but – you don't need it," she said, quickly. She seemed to be forcing herself to keep her gaze steadily on us. "Not if you don't care about getting them home."

"What do you mean?" Zayek asked, reaching into my pocket for the PADD and stepping back toward the cells.

"It's simple," she said, crouching down so she was level with him. "To get _Voyager_ to Earth, we had to keep the slipstream intact, and so we had to send the right phase correction. But if all you care about is keeping _Voyager_ from crashing, you can just shut down the drive, and – "

"Collapsing the slipstream early enough will save their lives," Zayek finished. "Yes, I see."

"Tessa," Chakotay said, sharply.

She ignored him, leaning toward Zayek as he took notes. "They get thrown back into normal space, still in the Delta Quadrant, but in one piece. Now, I'm not an expert on warp field kinetics, but I do know that the shutdown mechanism for a drive like that one depends on adjusting the ship's hyperdimensional footprint to normal space. First, the deflector geometry needs to be reset – that's right."

I came up behind Zayek, looking down over his shoulder. Starting from the generic model we'd worked out for a quantum drive, they modified it to suit _Voyager_'s hybrid systems. She might not have formally studied warp theory, but I guessed that Tessa had been surrounded by calculations and schematics for long enough that she wasn't as ignorant as she claimed. It only took a few minutes for her to guide Zayek through the mathematics, arriving at a string of numbers and symbols far shorter and simpler than the one we had imagined. Chakotay looked away, clearly frustrated and torn, but Harry just fixed Tessa and Zayek with an unreadable gaze, leaning on one arm against the wall.

Zayek held the PADD up to the force field and Tessa read over it, mumbling, "Okay – that will realign the deflector dish, which should – the benamite array will disengage – good – and then the Hammond assembly needs to emit the halcyon particles to cool the reaction – and then the slipstream should disperse." She looked up at Zayek. "Good work. The sequence is correct, and your syntax is flawless."

"Will it be gradual enough?" I asked. "You're sure the same thing won't happen again?"

"If it's early enough, this should cool the core and disperse the stream in a matter of milliseconds, rather than femtoseconds. It'll be enough to maintain structural integrity as the ship realigns with normal space." She pushed herself to her feet, then said, "But you'll have to send it to them _after_ Harry's correction failed and they lost contact with the shuttle, or history will just repeat itself, except this time, there may be no survivors to clean up afterwards."

I nodded thoughtfully. After they lost contact, but before the core destabilized beyond recovery: a delicate balance. "Okay," I said. "And Tessa – thank you, for – I don't know, for understanding."

Though her face was in shadow, I thought I saw the trace of a smile in the half-light. "I was prepared to give up everything too, and gain nothing," she said, voice muted. She looked over my shoulder toward Chakotay. "I know why you would change history, and maybe even lose your life, for the happiness of someone you love."

I tucked the PADD away again. Chakotay had retreated to the bunk, and though he met my eyes in silent reproach said nothing. At the comm. panel by the door, Zayek had just reached up to call the ensign when Harry said, almost too quietly to be heard, "Send it three minutes and 48 seconds before the crash, okay?"

I looked back, but he had already disappeared from view. The door slid open and the guard gestured to us, glancing up and down the empty corridor. "Thank you," I called back. Bendala raised an eyebrow, but I just offered him a cool smile and said, "They gave us our lives back, Ensign."


	14. Homecoming

**Winter's Child, concluded.

* * *

**

It took only a few minutes for us to input the correction and code the time; after so many hours of planning, it seemed impossibly simple. Still, as we faced each other, seated on the bed with the transceiver between us, neither of us made a move to send it. I almost wished that it weren't so easy; if it had still been a puzzle, a challenge, maybe we wouldn't have hesitated to finish it.

"Bea," Zayek said eventually, bunching the quilt in one hand, "do you think they'll know that the message came from the future?"

"It'll have a temporal displacement signature, won't it?" I traced the circuitry with a finger, marveling that the Borg had designed something to penetrate time that was so small, so innocuous. "But they won't know who sent it, of course, or what happened in the altered timeline."

He looked up at me, and I drank in his features: his unruly dark curls, the rounded points of his ears, the mole on his chin. I suppressed the urge to tell him how much I would miss him, knowing the logical response he'd offer, but he seemed to read it in my eyes. "Maybe we could tell them," he said.

"What do you mean?"

He clenched the blanket more tightly. "Suddenly, I – I don't want to die, Bea." He dropped his gaze, embarrassed by that very human hesitation. "If we send a message, telling them why – why we had to change history, then at least they'll know that we existed." He bit at the inside of his cheek nervously, then said, "And the other you – you'll know, too."

My heart broke. "Zayek," I said, admitting for the first time something that had been nagging at me, "I don't think my mother will keep me. Not if she's still in the Delta Quadrant, still _Voyager_'s captain." I thought back to what Tom had told me in the icy corridor; two days, but it seemed a lifetime ago. "She can't let me break her rules."

We sat in silence for a long moment. Ultimately, it didn't matter, and we both knew it: our lives were hardly the point. But in that bright, warm room, smelling faintly of disinfectant and clean linen, we took the time to mourn ourselves. After a few minutes, Zayek punched a few buttons on the tricorder and held it up. "Tell her," he said softly. "They should know about us."

I locked eyes with him, but he was in earnest; maybe we could send a message to the future. I stared into the input recorder on the tricorder, trying to marshal my thoughts: there was so much to say, but I knew a viable message had to be short to piggyback on the temporal carrier wave. Finally, I nodded decisively and began.

"Hello, mama." I closed my eyes, opened them again, and let a smile slip onto my face. "I mean, Captain. I'm sorry – that was the mistake I wasn't going to make, and look." I paused, again arranging my expression into something neutral, an approximation of Starfleet professionalism. "We wanted you to know that this is your second chance, Captain. Fifteen years ago, _Voyager_'s slipstream destabilized and collapsed, and nearly everyone was killed in the crash that followed. It's not the way it should have happened, and with Harry's help we're rewriting history so that it doesn't." I imagined my mother on the other side of the recorder, her eyes bright, mouth open in mute surprise. I smiled at that woman, who I had never known. "I have a request to make of you, though. Two, really."

"As captain, I ask you to enter the following names into the log – the casualties of fate, so to speak. Even though in your timeline they'll never be born, they're giving their lives for the ship and crew, so that _Voyager_ can continue her journey. If you could remember them – " Zayek shifted, and I amended " – remember _us_, we would be grateful." All my life, I had listed the dead and the lost, and it was strange to suddenly count myself among them. "Miral Kathryn Torres. Ada Ayala-Matteo. Harry Owen Paris. Zayek Swinn. And – and me. Beatrice Teya Janeway."

I dropped my voice and leaned incrementally toward the tricorder. "You're not just a captain, though. You lead a community, and I've seen how much you're willing to give up for them. I know how many ways you've found of atoning, but don't let that stop you from – please, be glad of your ship, Captain. Of your crew." I paused, uncertain whether to say anything about myself, to assure her that I wasn't begging for my life but only for hers – but it seemed false, contrived, to remind her of the consequences of her night with Chakotay, when it was surely already on her mind. Instead, I just said, "Enjoy your living ship, the working sonic showers and even Neelix's cooking.

"This is for everyone, the dead and the living who deserved better, but – it's for you, too, who are my captain, and who became my mother, so that you might walk a different road – a warmer, more joyful one." I curled my lips in an uneven smile, so like hers. Would she see the similarity? "Remember us, Captain, and get your crew home."

That was it: once the message was compressed and embedded in the signal, there was nothing more to be done or said. I disconnected the transponder from the tricorder, and held it in the palm of my hand, thumb hovering over the keypad. Zayek nodded once, but before I entered the command, a call came from the main cabin.

"Beatrice!" My mother's voice was excited, more animated than I had heard her since the rescue. Unthinking, I plunged the transceiver into my pocket as she hurried into the room. "LaForge has invited us all to the bridge – Earth's almost in visual range." She stopped short, as I attempted to smile. "What are you doing, Bea?"

"Nothing," I said quickly, my eyes falling to the PADD still on the bed. "Just – studying." Zayek, his back to the door, closed his eyes in exasperation at my answer. I scrunched my forehead at him as my mother crossed and picked up the PADD, scrolling through the calculations, and for a moment, we weren't martyrs or temporal pioneers, just children.

"These look like – quantum warp dynamics," she said slowly.

"Yes," I said, "well, we were – we were – "

"Going over the entrance exams for the Academy," Zayek supplied, turning with enviable calm to face her. "Warp theory seemed a good a place to start as any. Shall we proceed to the bridge?"

With a flick of her wrist, my mother tossed the PADD back down, looking at both of us curiously. "Yes," she said. "Let's go."

* * *

The bridge of the _Challenger_ was big and bright, but crowded: the fifteen _Voyager_ crew members were grouped on the lower deck, between the command chair and the conn, and I had the sense that more ensigns than usual were clustered around the duty stations, surreptitiously observing us all. I could see why, because even clean and warmed up, we were refugees; even Tom, Joe, and Maddie, who had always seemed strong and capable, looked thin and frail in the white light. I fingered the transponder in my pocket, and imagined each of them as hardy and curious as the grey-shouldered officers all around us.

After a few minutes of hushed conversation, as Greg pointed out the different duty stations and B'Elanna muttered about the inefficient warp processing displayed on the nearest panel, LaForge cleared his throat. "Captain Janeway," he said, almost uncertainly. "Would you - ?"

My mother smiled, but it was a formality; her eyes were hollow as she looked over her little crew. "Ensign," she called to the operations officer, who straightened. "On screen."

The planet that rolled below was very different from the glacier-bound world that had been our home. Under the rolling clouds, vast expanses of blue sparkled, and I could make out dark green forests, dun-colored deserts, and the flash of white ice at the pole. I felt rather than heard my mother's intake of breath: twenty years since she had seen it last.

LaForge walked forward and leaned up against the conn. "No matter how many times I come home," he said, quietly, "it just never gets old."

"She's a beauty, all right," Tom said. He bounced Miral on his shoulder and glanced toward his wife, who had her arms crossed across her chest, staring with a furious intensity at the vibrant world. "I only wish that we could all have made it home."

The captain shifted, and said, without looking at Tom, "It still might happen, if we don't find that transceiver." I glanced to my mother, expecting to see her roll her eyes again at the mention of the device, but instead found her looking steadily at me.

"I doubt anyone took it," Tom said easily, ignoring the stiffness in LaForge's tone and laying his cheek against his daughter's warm head. "Treason doesn't really suit us, Captain."

The planet rolled on the viewscreen, hours away but still, large as life. On the surface, 5.5 billion people woke up every day; it was unimaginable to me, crowded as I felt by the twenty strangers standing with me on the bridge. Were they all as bright and clean and whole as the _Challenger_ crew? Somehow, the people who had raised me seemed frailer, more broken at that moment than they ever had before. After everything they had endured, it wasn't fair, I thought, that they should be so marked, going home to a shining world like that one.

"It doesn't, Tom," my mother said, and her voice was low, hoarse, yet somehow musical. "But I could understand it, couldn't you?" She looked around at her crew, and one by one they turned from the viewscreen to meet her eyes. "I could understand wanting to wipe the slate clean, to restore the crew we left behind, to set _Voyager_ again on her journey. As her captain," and she sighed, lined blue eyes meeting mine again, "I would do anything to accomplish that."

LaForge sighed heavily. "As would I, if it were my ship," he said. "I suppose I'm fortunate that you didn't take the opportunity, or I would have already failed." He returned to the command chair, and around me the survivors drew closer together. My mother, though, didn't move as they searched out mountain ranges and man-made features, just held my gaze, studying me with a penetrating clarity that had for fifteen years been dulled by grief.

Finally, she nodded, almost imperceptibly. "Anything," she repeated, and returned her gaze to the screen. I resisted the urge to reach out for her hand, to thank her or just feel her heartbeat in her fingers one more time, and instead felt the transceiver, warm against my skin.

Zayek stepped up to my shoulder. "Now, Bea," he breathed, and I nodded too and pulled it out, still hidden in my fist. Zayek wrapped his cool brown hand against mine, and we each laid a thumb against the miniscule key. We didn't need to count to three to do it together, but at the last minute I glanced again toward my mother. A narrow hand held to her heart, blue eyes bright with tears, I knew that she was ready, too.

Though I wanted to restore them, the dead were still abstractions to me, and if it were only them, I might have forsaken logic and clung to my life. But as I studied my mother's sharp profile, I knew that I had already made the choice. She had given me everything, the warmth of her body, the quickness of her mind, the little hope she had left, but she was right: it could never be enough. What I wanted was her, whole, and standing there on another captain's bridge, her own ship abandoned, I knew that the gash that _Voyager_ had left in her heart was irreparable. What could I do, but give her back her life?

I don't know whose touch sent the message, but we both felt the device hum with the command. How long would it take? Would we feel it, when the timeline righted itself? I tangled Zayek's fingers in my own, letting the transceiver drop to the floor. It didn't matter if anyone realized, not now.

I pressed my free hand against my heart, too, and waited for history to change.


	15. Author's Notes

**Author's Notes**

* * *

The readers of Trek fanfiction are smart; they pick out continuity or character errors instantly, and have heard enough official technobabble to spot nonsense with no trouble. Out of respect for the genre and for all of you, I did my best to check facts, numbers, and names. Thanks to Jim Wright's _Voyager_ reviews, the official Star Trek website, and Memory Alpha for being excellent sources for this.

Sometimes, though, I couldn't find the information I wanted, and I took certain liberties with what I could. I don't feel too bad about this – after all, the writers made up characters and played with the rules of pseudoscience every week – but I did put a lot of thought into it. I include the following notes, just in case anyone was wondering where these ideas came from.

* * *

**Who are all these survivors (and others)?**

This was the trickiest part. As an ensemble fic, **Winter's Child** depends on the crew living and working together believably. I didn't want it to just be the main cast, because there were 140 people we never heard from who had a shot at survival, too. The official characters I looked up on Memory Alpha.

_Ayala_ we heard about a thousand times, and he showed up consistently over the course of the series (but they never gave him a first name?). He was Maquis, and he worked in engineering and ops before ending up as a security officer on the bridge. I imagine him as the strong and silent type; he left his sons in the AQ, and I liked the idea of him getting a second chance at a family.

_Foster_ was real, too; she was a crewman at ops, and showed up a few times. (Originally, I had her as Beth _Thompson_, but apparently she was a he. Oops.) I wanted someone unprepossessing, not particularly brilliant, an ordinary enlisted crewman who would be transformed by her tragedy… not everyone could have adorable hybrid babies on a broken ship.

_J__arot_ was a Betazoid, mentioned in "Counterpoint." I was intrigued by the possibility of having another telepath and empath aboard, without the strictures of Vulcan logic, though I never really explored that, and wanted Naomi to have a mentor.

_Swinn_ exists, but I called her Madelein (TPTB never named her). She was a Starfleet engineer, who we met in "Tuvix" and "Resolutions;" she was one of the crew members who wanted to get help from the Vidiians. They didn't develop her much, but she struck me as the kind of timid character who would rise to a challenge and do whatever was necessary to survive… and I like giving red-shirt nobodies the chance to develop a backbone. (It was entirely coincidental that she was African American; I didn't actually find a picture of her until I wrote this.)

_Matteo_ I made up. Come on; doesn't he sound adorable?

_Admiral Patterson_ is the one who showed the new captain around _Voyager_ in "Relativity." I would never have the audacity to invent anyone who would call Janeway "Katie" to her face.

_Phoebe Janeway_ might as well be canon. _Culhane, Sena, Trumari, Delaney, Sharr, _and_ Jor _were all mentioned on the series as well; _T'Rel_ is the name I made up for that female Vulcan who we see in "Repression."

I didn't use all of these characters, but I spent a lot of time thinking about them, and I hope that it came through that each of them had a story here. I developed Janeway, Tom Paris, and Naomi Wildman because I thought that they would be the most important in Bea's life, but it would have been easy to make this story third person, four times as long, and explore the effects of the crash on each survivor. (For instance - how did Tom and B'Elanna finally get together in this timeline? Cheerful, self-sacrificing Maddie doesn't express her resentment, but it's there. And what a terrible compromise for Eddie and Greg - finding a partner only by losing all your friends.) It was hard to resist telling them, but all those stories are in the background, influencing Bea and her decision even if she only refers to them obliquely.

**How could they possibly survive the crash?**

Here's my logic: some places on the ship are better shielded and stabilized than others. The bridge makes sense; the center of command should be the safest place on the ship. The mess hall was convenient, but it's not too out there – as their gathering place for five years, I'd bet they reinforced the hull so that they had a bunker (so to speak). And engineering is a no-brainer – what's more important to cushion than the warp core?

**If decks 10-15 were compacted, how did anyone in engineering survive?**

Aha, you caught me: that's deck 11. Again, I think that the inertial stabilizers and structural reinforcements around the warp core would keep that area from being entirely crushed, and if anyone on the lower half of the ship were to survive, it would be those protected by those same backup systems.

**It seems unrealistic that they had so little energy...**

My understanding is that everything on the ship relies on the warp reactor, which is pretty much an infinite source of energy. When the ship crashed, it would short out all the systems and shut down the core; with the reaction cold, how would they recharge anything? The few independent sources (tricorders, lights, etc.), wouldn't go very far, and I further propose that an electromagnetic shockwave from the failure of the slipstream drive would damage those power sources, too. Even Starfleet batteries don't last forever.

**How come they never sent a message?**

They tried, but I conveniently crushed their comm. equipment and destroyed their power sources. It's tough, getting rescued in my world.

**Then… how did they modify the lighting? The gel packs?**

The last cry of those few uncrushed power cells, I guess. Medical, engineering, and scanning devices would have a short life after the crash, and could be used to adjust the spectrum or introduce a resequencing virus into the gel packs.

**Are you just making things up?**

Yes. But I've spent most of my life learning how to speak science and Trek, in turns, and I think that more than qualifies me to invent 24th century pseudoscience. I'm trained in physical chemistry, and by extension plenty of math, biochemistry, and physics. The ideas I came up with for this story are not nearly as absurd as, say, the hyper-evolution in "Threshold" or the medical necessity of Seven's catsuit.

**Okay. What about Vulcans? **

What about them?

**Tuvok mediated through his pon farr in season seven...**

Yeah, but it's a whole lot harder to meditate in extreme physical discomfort, and we know that it doesn't work for all Vulcans ("Blood Fever"). I imagine that in the extreme cold, it would be much harder to control _all_ emotions and drives, especially for a desert-bred race, and that even someone like Tuvok would be unable to balance out his neurochemistry.

Whether he would rather die or betray his wife is another question entirely, and one that neither I nor Tuvok took lightly.

**What about Tuvok's neurological condition?**

I ignored it, quite deliberately. It was a bit much for this story – can you imagine Janeway burying her crew, raising a child she never intended to have in the harshest environment I can imagine, _and_ helping her best friend through the Vulcan equivalent of Alzheimer's? Forget sad and guilty; she'd be deranged.

Besides, who knows. Maybe the condition set in late enough that Zayek was old enough to meld with his father, or Jarot was able to help him keep it at bay.

**It seems a little risky, to pin the success of the story on Bea and Zayek deciphering weird Borg technology.  
**

Well, Wesley saved the day at least once a month on the _Enterprise-D_. Shouldn't Kathryn Janeway's daughter be every bit as precocious as Beverly Crusher's son?

Seriously, though, they had a bizarre education, conducted by adults who knew nothing about teaching children and had a lot of recent experience with the Collective. You teach with what you have, and what they had was the remains of a whole lot of Borg-modified systems and a bunch of excellent engineers. Besides, what would you rather learn about, Vulcan literature or a creepy race of cyborgs?

**But Harry didn't get to send his message!**

Different timeline, different history. I had to sidestep several of the plot twists in "Timeless" for the purposes of this narrative - the power failing, for instance, or needing to dissect Seven for the timestamp. In this scenario, it wasn't Harry's last words that mattered, no matter how tortured poor Ensign Kim will be.

Besides, I suspect that the passing mention in Bea's message will be enough for Janeway. She's a smart cookie.

**Wait. What happens next?**

I don't know (and neither does Bea). Temporal paradoxes might give Janeway a headache, but when it comes to imagining Part Two, they're a whole lot of fun.

It might be an entirely new universe, full of adorable J/C babies, or Janeway might deny everything in the morning. Maybe their correction was flawed, and they still crashed, except this time everyone died, and it's "Timeless" as written - meaning that Janeway still denies everything in the morning, we never hear about it, and my sneaky A/U suddenly fits into a non-alternate universe. Maybe Chakotay's so furious when he finds out that she terminated a pregnancy that he decides to date Seven, or maybe she miscarries before she can tell him and in her resentment dates a hologram (yes, I was a little fed up with the writers at the end there). Maybe... well. You get the idea.

I've actually written a few of these stories, but none of them seems to me right enough to be what happens next... they're all possibilities, some more true to canon than others. But after all, that's the point of changing history - to give them their possibilities back.

**Why 'Beatrice?'**

That's me (and Janeway) being clever. _Beatrice _comes from the Latin _Viatrix_, meaning – you guessed it – a traveler or voyager. It seemed fitting that Janeway name her daughter for her fallen ship, the greatest lady in her life.

* * *

**Thanks, etc.**

I've never shared my stories before - I've read too much fan fic that was poorly thought out or executed, and without a second set of eyes wasn't sure whether my wonky AU would be among them.

I've been overwhelmed by your enthusiasm for this story, which is something that's haunted me since I first saw "Timeless" (nine years ago!). I appreciated every comment, and knowing that "Winter's Child" had readers made me much stricter with myself when I edited it. (You should see the first draft - so much sap! Fun to write, yes, but not as true to the story that this needed to be.) Your support has made me a better writer and this a better story, and I am very grateful.

Thank you, also, for understanding that sometimes, the happy ending we want isn't quite the one we get. (I for one wanted to write a sappy reunion/settling down in Antartica scene, but Bea knew better.)


End file.
